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Switzerland’s Belinda Bencic won the gold medal at the women’s singles tennis tournament on Saturday night, beating Marketa Vondrousova of the Czech Republic, positioning herself as one of the very few players to win singles and doubles gold at the same Olympics.
Bencic beat Vondrousova in a tight third set to win the game 7-5, 2-6, 6-3 and broke Vondrousova’s serve in the eighth game of the final set after a long break to gain possession of the big toe. He was heavily bandaged on his right foot by a trainer.
Bencic didn’t seem angry because of the medical break. As the coach wrapped his toe, he was jumped into “High Hopes” by Panic in his seat! At the Disco played through the stadium’s loudspeakers.
Vondrousova took a time-out against Bencic in the next match, but failed to convert and then made mistakes on the side of the points for Bencic to win.
Bencic is scheduled to play in the women’s doubles final on Sunday.
If Bencic can win the doubles gold, she will be the fourth woman to win both singles and doubles at the same Games, an achievement most recently achieved by Serena Williams in London in 2012. Bencic had hoped to play mixed doubles with Roger Federer as well, but chose not to play in Tokyo while dealing with an injured knee.
Bencic’s showdown with Vondrousova, often involving players trading strong ground kicks, turned out to be much quieter and more subdued than Tokyo organizers had hoped. restrictions on fans due to the coronavirus pandemic. The stands were almost empty, and moments of scattered applause from the Swiss and Czech delegations and volunteers hum of cicadas (a summer fixture in Tokyo) and the rumble of cars on a nearby highway.
For casual fans, the tournament’s appeal has been virtually wiped out over the course of the week. Vondrousova defeated Naomi Osaka In the third round, he dashed many Japanese hopes of winning an Olympics-exclusive gold medal for Osaka, one of the country’s biggest sports stars. Osaka, who lit the olympic cauldron During the opening ceremony, she lost to Vondrousova in about an hour, after which she said the weight of the fight played in her defeat.
“I should have gotten used to it by now, but everything is a little hard to scale because of the break I took,” he said. received harsh criticism in Japanperhaps diminishes efforts to highlight the racial diversity of its athletes in the country.
Earlier on Saturday, Ukraine’s Elina Svitolina came back from a bad first set, defeating Kazakhstan’s Elena Rybakina 1-6, 7-6 (5), 6-4 in bronze.
Germany’s Alexander Zverev and Russia’s Karen Khachanov will face each other in the men’s final scheduled for Sunday.
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