Wimbledon: Paolini gives hope and joy to Italy

LONDON -- In Italy where time is reckoned in eons and ages rather than mere centuries, it’s unusual that anything happens that hasn’t happened before. But this year’s Wimbledon has been unprecedented for Italians in numerous ways. Jasmine Paolini has taken SW19 by pure force of personality, just as she stormed into the finals at the French Open with her irrepressible smile and indefatigable energy. In an era when top female tennis players are of Amazonian stature, Paolini is 5’4” and often gives the impression of being a bumblebee buzzing amid hollyhocks. Until this spring she seemed mired in middle rankings and was usually referred to as a journeyman. In other words, a player who toured the circuit, winning a match here or there, but seldom making it to the final rounds and seldom making it into the headlines.
Now all that has changed and she’s ranked seven in the world. How she has done this often seems incomprehensible, even to her. In post-match interviews, she mostly emphasizes how happy she is, and her buoyant mood does appear to have given her an advantage over her often tense and lugubrious opponents. Case in point, her semifinal against Donna Vekic, a 5’10” tall Croatian who has never lived up to her potential, in part because of injuries, in part because of lack of confidence. Against Paolini she started off well, zipping through the first set 6-2. But then Paolini began to impersonate the Energizer Bunny, scampering around the court, retrieving what looked to be clear winners. Not that Paolini just lobbed the ball back. She belted backhands and forehands with plenty of pace. Once she had salted away the second set 6-4, the match turned into a war of attrition. Vekic struggled mightily to keep up with Paolini, matching her stroke for stroke, but admitting afterward, “I felt like I was dying.” The third set went to a 10-point tiebreak, with the irrepressible Paolini the victor and Donna Vekic in tears. The match lasted an exhausting two hours and 51 minutes, the longest semifinal in the history of women’s tennis at Wimbledon, and Paolini advanced to the final, the first Italian to do so.
There she will face Barbora Krejcikova who survived a three-set semifinal against Elena Rybakina. Although her ranking has fallen off in recent years – Krejcikova was seeded 31 at Wimbledon – she’s a former French Open champion in both singles and doubles, a worthy opponent for the fourth-seeded Rybakina, a transplanted Russian now representing Kazakhstan. Fashion-model tall – 6 feet – and willowy, she had no trouble winning the first set 6-3. But then Krejcikova raised her game and started running Rybakina around the court like a mad stork, and the Czech wound up taking the last two sets 6-3, 6-4. This ranks as a major upset given Rybakina’s Wimbledon title two years ago. As for who will be favored in the final, I’ll put my money on the Tuscan tornado.
After edging Italy’s fatigued Jannik Sinner in the quarterfinals in a 5-set match that might easily have gone the other way, Russian Daniil Medvedev’s reward was a run-in with the defending Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz of Spain. Even after the Russian blew through the first-set tiebreaker 7-1, the BBC commentators blithely assumed that it was only a matter of time before the powerful Spaniard started to rip acutely angled groundstrokes and smother Medvedev. Those announcers, it should be remarked, included former Brat, now redeemed, John McEnroe, and current Australian bad boy, Nick Kyrgios, who appears to be auditioning for McEnroe’s role. As Alcaraz ground Medvedev into fine powder, McEnroe and Kyrgios discussed among other things whether Kyrgios would make a comeback as a player. It came out during their palaver that Kyrgios had been serving as a hitting partner during Wimbledon for Novak Djokovic.
This provided a smooth segue after Medvedev subsided against Alcaraz and the second match started between surprise semifinalist Lorenzo Musetti of Italy and seven time Wimbledon champ, Novak Djokovic of Serbia. Djokovic, who underwent knee surgery on June 5, wore an elastic brace whose dingy grey colour led to a conversation about whether that was within the Wimbledon rules that call for all-white attire.
Musetti had once won a match against Djokovic on red clay in Monte Carlo, but recently he had begun to have good results on grass, first at a tournament in Stuttgart, then at Queens Club, the annual warm-up for Wimbledon. The bearded, baby-faced Italian gave a stylish performance using his increasingly rare one-handed backhand to good effect, frustrating Djokovic with tantalizing sliced shots. In the end, Djokovic inevitably won, 6-4, 7-6, 6-4. But the match was more amusing and competitive than the score might suggest. One thing that the score did suggest was that Alcaraz, who hits backhand bombs with two fists, should prove to be a much harder block of marble to break than the Carrara native Lorenzo Musetti.
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