No. 1 Barty, top women win easily after Ida delays
NEW YORK — About the only problems No. 1 seed Ash Barty and other top players encountered Thursday afternoon at the U.S. Open came in the delays trying to get to Flushing Meadows in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida’s remnants blowing through the Northeast a night earlier.
Barty, a two-time major champion including at Wimbledon in July, Tokyo Olympic gold medalist Belinda Bencic, double Wimbledon title winner Petra Kvitova and other seeded women including No. 14 Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, No. 17 Maria Sakkari, No. 23 Jessica Pegula and No. 28 Anett Kontaveit all won in two sets to get to the third round.
Advancing in straight sets in men’s play during the day session: Summer
Games gold medalist and 2020 U.S. Open runner-up Alexander Zverev and No. 22 seed Reilly Opelka of the U.S.
The most-anticipated match on the schedule was to come at night, when No. 1 Novak Djokovic took his 22-match Grand Slam winning streak into Arthur Ashe Stadium against 121stranked Tallon Griekspoor of the Netherlands. Djokovic is trying to complete the first calendar-year Grand Slam in men’s tennis since Rod Laver in 1969 and is bidding to break the men’s mark of 20 career major titles he shares with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
With the sun out and nary a cloud around, play in second-round matches on the outer courts was pushed back from 11 a.m. to noon to allow the U.S. Tennis Association time to clean up downed tree branches and other scattered debris and make sure everything was ready for competition on Day 4 of the year’s last Grand Slam tournament.
Once all was ready to go, it was just a matter of players’ transportation navigating traffic delays caused by road closures and vehicles that were abandoned overnight; a trip from Manhattan to Queens that normally might take 30-45 minutes took 11 / 2hours or longer for some.
“We had to do a full assessment of the grounds and making sure the courts were playable and that Hawk-Eye (electronic linecalling) would function,” USTA spokesman Chris Widmaier said.
He said that while the forecast called for heavy rain Wednesday night, New York police did not advise the USTA to cancel the evening session during a routine twice-daily briefing.