Women’s tennis win is Puerto Rico’s first gold

Unseeded woman’s final upset nets nation’s first Olympic gold

RIO DE JANEIRO — The spectators told Monica Puig they believed she could win Puerto Rico’s first Olympic gold medal in any sport, providing a soundtrack of “Si se puede!” — “Yes, we can!” — during the Rio de Janeiro Games women’s tennis final. She could. And she did. The unseeded and unheralded Puig capped her run of upsets with the biggest one of all Saturday, overpowering No. 2 Angelique Kerber of Germany 6-4, 4-6, 6-1 to become the Olympic champion.

“I did hear everybody saying, “Yes, you can! Yes, you can! Yes, you can!’ I kept repeating it inside myself: ‘Yes, I can! Yes, I can! Yes, I can!’” Puig said. “They really helped me believe and just showed me they were there for me, whether I was going to win or lose.”

Puig’s father told her he believed, too, emailing the lyrics to the Puerto Rican national anthem a day earlier, just in case they would be needed.

And so, as the strains of that song echoed around an Olympic arena for the first time, and Puerto Rico’s red-white-and-blue flag was raised to the highest level during a medal ceremony for the first time, Puig remembered what Dad had written.

She recognized plenty of the words as fans sang them, but she just couldn’t join in for a simple reason: too many tears.

“If I would’ve stopped crying, I probably would have started singing,” Puig said. “I was choking up the whole time.”

A 22-year-old born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and now based in Florida, Puig is also the first woman representing her country to earn a medal of any color. When she finished a tense closing game — saving six break points and converting her fourth match point — she flung away her racket and went over to collect a flag she paraded across the court.

Gigi Fernandez, who is Puerto Rican, won two Olympic women’s doubles gold medals in tennis, but did so while representing the United States.

Ranked 34th, Puig added her surprising win over Kerber — a German who won the Australian Open and was Wimbledon runner-up this year — to victories in Rio over two other past major winners, Garbine Muguruza and Petra Kvitova.

Kvitova earned the bronze for the Czech Republic by beating Madison Keys of the United States, 7-5, 2-6, 6-2.

CHARLES KRUPA/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Unseeded Monica Puig of Puerto Rico tosses her racket and rejoices after winning the Olympic women’s singles tennis final in three sets over No. 2 seed Angelique Kerber of Germany on Saturday at Rio de Janeiro. The gold medal was the first ever by...