Sofia Kenin \u00a9 Gallo Images<\/p>\n
Former Australian Open champion Sofia Kenin opened her 2026 season with a hard-fought 6-4, 4-6, 6-3 win over Romanian qualifier Elena-Gabriele Ruse in the Brisbane International on Sunday.\n<\/p>\n
Kenin, who won the Australian Open as a 21-year-old in 2020, recovered from a second-set lapse to outlast Ruse and set up a second-round clash against seventh seed Ekaterina Alexandrova.\n<\/p>\n
“My last match was in October so it was definitely weird. But I trusted the pre-season I had and I felt like I was playing good tennis,” said the 27-year-old American.<\/p>\n
“She is a really tough player and I had to stay with it, definitely wasn’t easy.”\n<\/p>\n
Australian wildcard Ajla Tomljanovic eased into the second round with a 6-1, 6-3 win over France’s Elsa Jacquemot and will now play 11th seed Karolina Muchova.\n<\/p>\n
“I had such a great preparation but you never know when that first match comes, anything can happen on the day,” Tomljanovic said.\n<\/p>\n
“I was hoping to do at least 80 per cent of what I’ve been practising and I think I did even more. This feels amazing.”\n<\/p>\n
In the men’s draw, American Francis Tiafoe was too strong for Australian wildcard Aleksandar Vukic 6-2, 6-2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sofia Kenin \u00a9 Gallo Images Former Australian Open champion Sofia Kenin opened her 2026 season with a hard-fought…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":387981,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-387980","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}