Coco leads US charge
WHO needs Serena Williams?
When the US Open began, American faces were glum. Their serial champion was days away from giving birth to a baby daughter and, without Serena, who was going to fly the Stars and Stripes?
Step forward then Coco Vandeweghe, Venus Williams and Sloane Stephens. Of the four available semi-final berths in New York, three of them have been filled by Americans and, in the early hours of this morning, Madison Keys was hoping to make it four as she took on Kaia Kanepi.
There have not been four Americans in the women’s semi-finals since the days of Chris Evert, Tracy Austin and Martina Navratilova. They were joined by Barbara Potter in the penultimate round in 1981.
Vandeweghe muscled her way into the last four with a 7-6, 6-3 win over Karolina Pliskova yesterday. It was the second time this year she had done as well in a Major and the second time she had done for the world No1 in the process (at the Australian Open, she beat Angelique Kerber in the fourth round before losing to Venus Williams in the semis).
With her customary mix of powerful hitting, thundering winners and eye-popping errors, she was too big and too strong for Pliskova.
The Czech not only lost the match but by failing to reach her second, consecutive US Open final, she lost her No1 ranking to Garbine Muguruza, the Wimbledon champion. Vandeweghe, now 25 and ranked No 22 in the world, has waited a long time for this moment.
“When I won this event as a junior at 16, I always dreamed about being here on the real stage,” she said. “Now here I am and I couldn’t wish for anything better.”
Venus Williams kept up the pace of her remarkable year by edging past Petra Kvitova 6-3, 3-6, 7-6 on Tuesday night.
For both women, this season has been the comeback of all comebacks.
In December Kvitova suffered career-threatening injuries when she escaped from an intruder armed with a knife. Her left hand was slashed and there were fears she would never play again.
Williams, meanwhile, was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease Sjogren’s Syndrome in 2011 and no one imagined she could continue playing, much less winning.
But this year, thanks to the power of positive thinking and sheer cussedness, she has reached the finals of the Australian Open and Wimbledon at the age of 37. Now she faces Stephens to reach another major final.
Rafael Nadal stormed into the men’s semi-finals last night with a crushing 6-1, 6-2, 6-2 win over the 19-year-old Andrey Rublev from Russia. The first set took just 23 minutes.
Rublev settled his nerves a little in the second set but by then Nadal was on a roll. He will now play Roger Federer or Juan Martin Del Potro.