China’s Wang Xiyu, fresh from conquering top seed Alexandra Eala, toppled Zhang Shuai to win Asian Games women’s tennis singles gold on Friday – and a ticket to the Los Angeles Olympics.<\/p>\n
The 25-year-old Wang<\/a> breezed past her compatriot 6-2, 6-1 in 66 minutes at the Higashiyama Park Tennis Center in Nagoya.<\/p>\n Tennis is one of seven sports at the Games where the winners receive an Olympic qualification place.<\/p>\n Wang paid tribute to the 37-year-old Zhang<\/a>, who has won multiple Grand Slam doubles titles and has now added a second Asian Games singles silver medal to the one she won in 2018 in Jakarta.<\/p>\n The veteran Zhang also bagged a team tennis gold in Guangzhou in 2010, when Wang would have been just nine years old.<\/p>\n “She is someone I really respect. Everything that she’s been through is also a form of encouragement to me,” said Wang.<\/p>\n “Still, on the court, the biggest form of respect I can show is by bringing my best to play her.”<\/p>\n The one-sided match was a contrast to the battle Wang had with Philippines star Eala<\/a> 24 hours earlier, when the Chinese world number 85 came through 3-6, 6-3, 6-2 after two hours and 34 minutes of intense action.<\/p>\n “This is what sport, what elite competition, is like. Your actions speak for you,” added Wang.<\/p>\n “It’s when you experience success through the trials that you know what it was all for. Keep trying.”<\/p>\n She then revealed her tennis skills were way ahead of her culinary efforts, but said it was important never to give up.<\/p>\n “I tried to make a dish of stir-fried cauliflower, and it all became burnt,” Wang said.<\/p>\n “There’s some difficulty in that dish; it’s so easy to get it wrong. I’ll keep trying.”<\/p>\n The men’s singles gold medal match on Saturday will see Hong Kong’s world number 100 Coleman Wong<\/a> take on China’s 111th-ranked Wu Yibing<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"China’s Wang Xiyu, fresh from conquering top seed Alexandra Eala, toppled Zhang Shuai to win Asian Games women’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":790101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-790100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=790100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/790101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=790100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=790100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=790100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}