Martina Hingis and Sania Mirza Win Wimbledon Women’s Doubles

mangaloretoday.com

Wimbledon, Sunday, 12 July: Martina Hingis has waited 17 years - half her life - to add to her three Wimbledon titles. The wait is over after a topsy-turvy, tooth-and-nail women’s doubles final in which the 34-year-old Swiss and her partner, India’s Sania Mirza, defeated the formidable Russian pairing of Ekaterina Makarova and Elena Vesnina.

 

The match started on Centre Court in bright sunshine and finished under the roof and floodlights, two and a half hours later, with Hingis and Mirza finally prevailing 5-7, 7-6, 7-5. Hingis may have won bigger individual prizes but the way that she and Mirza bunny-hopped around the court after coming through match point, finishing with a celebratory arse-bump, suggested that few victories have given her such satisfaction. (This is The Best Tennis I’ve Ever Played: Sania)

Perhaps they were surprised because it was, to be frank, a match that Hingis and Mirza rarely looked like winning. For most of it, Makarova and Vesnina were powerful and merciless. Vesnina, who announced each involvement in a rally with a glass-shattering shriek, smashed volleys like they had personally insulted her, while Makarova served faultlessly, at least until she served for the match at 5-3 in the final set.

That Hingis came through may have partly been down to a champion’s muscle memory, but the overwhelming support of the Centre Court crowd must have helped, too. Doubles tennis, by its nature, is collaborative, but it was hard for this final not to dominated by the narrative of one person with a dramatic personal history.

Almost inconceivably, Hingis won her first Wimbledon prize, the girls’ singles title, as a precocious 13-year-old in 1994. She first claimed the senior doubles title here two years later, aged 15, and then won her one and only singles championship here the following summer. Her last significant victory at Wimbledon came in the women’s doubles in 1998, when she was partnered by Jana Novotna.

It has certainly been an eventful decade and a half. Hingis retired, for the first time, in 2003, aged 22, after a pair of ankle surgeries, first on her right, then her left. She said she wanted to spend more time horse riding, maybe even patch up an education fractured by an adolescence on the tennis circuit. Hingis returned in 2005, rose to the world top 10 again, but then tested positive for cocaine at Wimbledon in 2007. The amount was miniscule - and she still denies taking anything - but she was banned for two years.

The third coming of Hingis - "no longer a spring chicken" as she said recently - has been as a doubles specialist since 2013. And she has clearly lost none of her skill and astute reading of the game: wWith Flavia Pennetta, she reached the final of the US Open in 2014, losing that time to Makarova and Vesnina; she then won the mixed doubles final of this year’s Australian Open with India’s Leander Paes.

Hingis will be reunited with Paes at Wimbledon on Sunday afternoon in the mixed doubles final against Austria’s Alexander Peya and Hungary’s Timea Babos. One of the wildest and weirdest stories in tennis is set to have another chapter.