COCO POPS INTO LAST 8
Unseeded Vandeweghe on the march
IT has not been seen since the blazing summer of 1976 — a women’s quarter-final line-up featuring none of the eight who reached this stage the year before.
Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova are in there, but today is largely about the new faces.
The unseeded Coco Vandeweghe has a famous surname in the USA — her grandfather and uncle were professional basketball players and her mother is former Olympic swimmer Tauna — and she can become a star in her own right if she beats Sharapova.
The 23-year-old, who upset sixth seed Lucie Safarova yesterday, was christened Colleen after her grandmother, who was Miss America 1952. The nickname came from her mum, who also gave unique names to her two sons, Beau and Crash, and her other daughter, Honey.
The world No 47 said: ‘My mum is just a 60s child and we all have nicknames. I have always enjoyed Coco, except my early school years when people were teasing me with Coco Pebbles and Coco Puffs (breakfast cereals) and all that sort of stuff definitely bugged me. But I love my name.’
This is the first time since 2004 that there are three Americans in the quarter-finals of the women’s singles at Wimbledon, with Madison Keys joining Vandeweghe and Williams in the last-eight.
Keys, 20, fought back from a set down to beat qualifier Olga Govortsova and will cause problems for Agnieszka Radwanska today with her big serve, which has taken the No 21 seed to the top of the tournament’s ace count with 47. With 1999 Wimbledon champion Lindsay Davenport in Keys’ corner since the end of last year, some believe she is a future world No 1 with the power she can create off her racket.
Keys is in the bottom half of a draw which is now certain to send a player outside the top 10 to the final, with 15th seed Timea Bacsinszky facing No 20 seed Garbine Muguruza in the other quarter-final. If Bacsinszky can reach her second Grand Slam semi-final in succession, she will enter the top 10 next week for the first time in her career. It would be a remarkable achievement for the 26-year-old who was working in restaurants and bars two years ago after deciding to leave the sport in preparation for a career in hotel management.
Bacsinszky said: ‘I wanted to be a waitress when I was 12. I never wanted to be a tennis player. It happened that I was just playing too good at a certain point. I had no choice.’
Today, she takes on Muguruza, the first Spanish woman to reach the quarter-finals at Wimbledon since Conchita Martinez in 2001.
Muguruza was too powerful for fifth seed Caroline Wozniacki and fell to the court in delight at her victory on a surface which she only played on for the first time in Nottingham three years ago.
The 21-year-old said: ‘It means a lot because I haven’t played a lot on grass. At the first tournament, I said, “I’m never coming back here, I cannot play on grass”.’