Britain’s Fran Jones said it “means everything” as she defeated her childhood hero Venus Williams in the first round of the Miami Open.<\/p>\n
Jones claimed a 7-5 7-5 victory over seven-time Grand Slam singles champion Williams, who – at 45-years-old – was the oldest player in the women’s singles draw.<\/p>\n
It is a first career WTA 1000 win for the 25-year-old, while it was Williams’ ninth successive defeat since a first-round win at Washington last summer.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, second seed Iga Swiatek was stunned by world number 50 Magda Linette, who fought back from a set down to win 1-6 7-5 6-3 in the second round.<\/p>\n
It is the first time in 74 tournaments that Swiatek, who received a first-round bye, has lost her opening match in a WTA Tour event.<\/p>\n
The reigning Wimbledon champion has failed to advance past the quarter-finals in all four of the tournaments she has played at in 2026.<\/p>\n
“I stopped doing anything well tactically,” Swiatek said after the defeat by her Polish compatriot.<\/p>\n
“It just was a bad match for me in the second and third sets. Unconsciously, or consciously, it’s hard for me to say. I need to work to get back from that, because I haven’t felt things like that for like five years.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Britain’s Fran Jones said it “means everything” as she defeated her childhood hero Venus Williams in the first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":534596,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-534595","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\/534595","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=534595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/534596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}