Jannik Sinner’s ambitions of winning a third straight Australian Open title looked close to being over as the Melbourne heat crept towards 40C.<\/p>\n
In the end, the rising temperatures helped the cramping Italian come through a testing third-round match – because the Grand Slam tournament’s heat rule was invoked.<\/p>\n
Only coming off court and having the roof pulled over saved Sinner from a shock defeat by American world number 85 Eliot Spizzirri.<\/p>\n
“I got lucky with the heat rule,” conceded Sinner, who came through to win 4-6 6-3 6-4 6-4.<\/p>\n
Sinner was undoubtedly the biggest winner on a sweltering day where play was suspended and almost 100,000 fans were warned to take care in the heat.<\/p>\n
Matches on the show courts are being played in cooler conditions under the roof, but play on the outside courts did not resume until 19:30 local time because of the heat. <\/p>\n
Mist tunnels, water machines and sun umbrellas helped cool down spectators.<\/p>\n
Ball kids placed their hands on their feet – instead of the court – to avoid burning their palms when crouching at the net post.<\/p>\n
American player Jessica Pegula says the stars are “used to” the searing heat, but Saturday’s conditions were a reminder of how brutal it can be at Melbourne Park.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jannik Sinner’s ambitions of winning a third straight Australian Open title looked close to being over as the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":426729,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-426728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426728","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=426728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426728\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/426729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}