Athlete of the Week: tennis player Sorana Cîrstea

At Wimbledon, Romanian tennis player Sorana Cîrstea broke a new record

Florin Orban, 15.07.2025, 13:50

Many tennis players, alongside their remarkable careers in singles competitions, also achieve truly great results in doubles. Sorana Cîrstea, for example, has recently reached the quarterfinals of the Wimbledon women’s doubles tournament, together with the Russian player Anna Kalinskaya. She thus achieved her best result in a Grand Slam tournament in a doubles event, a performance for which Radio Romania International designated her Athlete of the Week.

In the first round of the women’s doubles competition on the London grass, Cîrstea and Kalinskaia won 6-2, 6-3 against the Italian-American pair Angelica Moratelli / Sabrina Santamaria. The Romanian-Russian pair advanced to the second round by defeating the team made up of Kamila Rahimova from Russia and Czech athlete Anna Siskova 7-6, 4-6, 6-2. This was followed, in the next round, by a match against the 5th-seed Russian pair Mirra Andreeva / Diana Shnaider, which Cîrstea and Kalinskaya won 4-6, 7-6, 6-1. However, the two athletes’ journey came to an end in the quarterfinals, where they were defeated by the pair formed by Taiwanese Su-wei Hsieh and Latvian Jelena Ostapenko, 6-7, 6-3, 6-2. In the doubles competitions, the Romanian-Russian pair earned £87,500 and 430 WTA points.

Sorana Cîrstea was born in Târgovişte (southern Romania) on April 7, 1990. She turned pro in 2006, finishing the year ranked 348th in the world. She has won two WTA tournaments in her career so far: the first in 2008 in Tashkent and the second 13 years later in Istanbul. In August 2013, she climbed to the highest position of her entire career, namely 21st in singles. A difficult period followed, marked by physical problems, but Sorana recovered and, in recent years, has come very close to the shape that made her famous. According to the WTA website, she has earned over ten million dollars from tennis. (MI)