Radio Romania International Sports club
Tennis
Florin Orban, 05.07.2023, 13:45
The Wimbledon Tennis Tournament
is underway in England. It is arguably the most exquisite
competition of the entire professional schedule, mainly due to its history. The
lawn-only tournament is actually the world’s oldest such event. The maiden
edition was held in 1877. It was a gentlemen-only event: back then the winner
was Spencer Gore. Attending the final were roughly 200 fans who paid one
shilling each to be there. In the course of the 130 years that have passed since
the tournament’s inaugural edition, the event has seen a thoroughgoing change,
yet many elements part of the initial regulations system are still in place.
Today the prize money is somewhere to the tune of one million Euro all told. However,
the strict dress code is still in place, with the competitors having to dress in
white, almost completely.
Of all Romanian tennis
players, it is only Simona Halep who saw her name on the list of winners at
Wimbledon. Halep won the lawn final in 2019. Back then Halep grabbed a 6-2, 6-2
win against the greatest tennis player of the early 21stst century, Serena Williams. Halep succeeded an uncompromising straight-set win. In her blazing trail at
Wimbledon, Simona Halep outperformed Alyeksandra
Sasnovich, Mihaela Buzărnescu, Victoria Azarenka, Cori Gauff, Shuai Zhang and Elina
Svitolina. As part of the 2019 edition of the Wimbledon tournament, Halep lost only
one set, in the fixture against her fellow Romanian, Mihaela Buzărnescu.
In the men’s version of the Wimbledon tournament,
the Romanians made history five decades ago. We recall Ilie Nastase twice reached
the final: in 1972, when Stan Smith succeeded a hard-fought win against the Romanian,
in five sets, and in 1976, when Nastase conceded defeat to Sweden’s Björn Borg.
In 2023, Romania is
represented in the main draw only in the women’s version of the tournament. The
first tennis plyer to have entered the competition, WTA 57th-placed Ana
Bogdan, provided the first pleasant surprise, grabbing a 7-6, 7-6 win against WTA
15th-placed and 15th-seeded at Wimbledon, Russia’s
Lyudmila Samsonova.
