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Post by Admin on May 30, 2019 17:54:59 GMT
With her back against the wall, world No. 1 Naomi Osaka continues to confirm the heart and hunger of a champion. In a highly-anticipated meeting, Osaka overcame Victoria Azarenka, 4-6, 7-5, 6-3, to reach the third round of the French Open on Thursday. Osaka was down a set and a break, before cleaning up her hitting to deliver an impressive comeback victory in two hours and 50 minutes. "I feel like I didn't dip at all during this match, and she was just playing so well. I was just waiting for her to get a little bit tired," Osaka said. "I think she did towards the end of the second set and the third set. So that's when I just tried to really accelerate on how fast I was sort of winning the points." http://instagram.com/p/ByF1EUypRMO
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Post by Admin on Jun 1, 2019 18:25:55 GMT
Does it take a No. 1 to beat a No. 1? Before you think too hard about that, let's address the topic at hand: Katerina Siniakova, the 42nd-ranked singles player and No. 1 in doubles, has eliminated top seed Naomi Osaka, champion of the last two Grand Slam tournaments, in the third round of Roland Garros. The 23-year-old Czech won 6-4, 6-2.
This was the third consecutive match in Paris where Osaka lost the first, but this time the deficit was too much to overcome. She made 38 unforced errors, and as you might expect, they came at crucial junctures. The most crucial might not have been on a break point, but at deuce while trailing by a set and 2-3.
After serving, Siniakova was pushed around the court by a sequence of strong, well-placed Osaka groundstrokes. With only a short, open-court backhand needed to win the point, Osaka dumped the ball into the net. It was her 15th backhand error of the match, and a point later, she hit her 16th to allow Siniakova to escape with a hold.
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Post by Admin on Jun 3, 2019 18:31:58 GMT
Now Osaka, who was bidding to win her third consecutive Grand Slam, lost to Katerina Siniakova in the French Open third round. "I can relate to that", Wilander said about being No. 1. "It happened to me once in the Australian Open 1991, I was world No. 4 for 20 weeks but I did not feel like the world No. 1. In this tournament Osaka needed the supportive team around that would make her face the reality and say, Listen, you are not the number one in the world on the court at the moment because the clay-court season and Indian Wells and Miami were not that good. Somehow you have the No. 1 ranking next to yourself. But the way she plays will make her win more Majors, the best thing for her would be to go down to No. 2 and then start fighting to be back to the No. 1. But at the same time, we had said that it would be a tricky match. Siniakova played an excellent tennis, she is one of the best doubles players in the world, she played a lot of Fed Cups with Petra Kvitova, Karolina Pliskova and Lucie Safarova, she has been around for so long and she has a top player experience." On the concept that everybody can beat everybody in women's tennis, Osaka said: "It makes it seem like there is no consistency. But, I mean, I think there is -- I don't know. There is always people you can tell are going to go far, and I kind of hoped I was going to be one of them, but obviously I'm here now.
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Post by Admin on Jul 17, 2019 1:21:57 GMT
Naomi Osaka serves a tennis ball at a speed of 125 miles per hour. I do not need to tell you that this is nuts fast: 125 miles per hour is almost twice the maximum speed of an adult cheetah as it bounds across the savanna toward the jugular of a gazelle; 125 miles per hour is as fast as a Bugatti Veyron coming at you at 125 miles per hour from across a tennis court. It is another day of practice for one of the greatest tennis players in the world. The California sun is the brightest it has ever been, and my forehead glistens with an upsetting amount of moisture. Osaka's terra-cotta skin beams with the noble glaze of heroes. Her curls bounce around her head like a Byzantine halo, while my hair just kind of gradually dampens. Any tennis ball that comes near her gets smacked as if it has personally offended her, banished to the far side of the court, embarrassed and sad. I watch from a nearby bench, next to Abdul Sillah, Osaka's fitness coach, a man whose muscles have muscles, and whose voice is softer than a chinchilla wrapped in Egyptian cotton. He refers to Osaka as "the Baby-Faced Assassin." I look over at her, and she looks so, so bored, like every other 21-year-old at tennis practice. The key to making sure Osaka is at her physical peak, Sillah says, is honing that kill switch. When he trained Serena Williams, he quietly called her "the Closer," because she'd stop at nothing to win the match — fury coursed through her veins from the moment she set foot on the court until the moment she set foot on the podium. Osaka is different. Nothing about her gives warning of the existence of several reserves of rage bubbling just under the surface of her skin, and by the time she sends a 125-mile-per-hour tennis ball directly at you, it is too late, and rest in peace. I should have been wondering about why female tennis players are so often talked about in terms of violence, while male tennis players are balletic, the grace of their movements described with words like precision and power, elegance and stamina, finesse and intelligence. And then, months later, when Osaka lost her No. 1 world ranking at Wimbledon, and news outlets raced to describe the incident as “humiliating,” noting how she fled the “uncomfortably” silent press conference, “tears welling up in her eyes,” offering that maybe she is “distracted” by “offers, opportunities” that caused her a momentary lapse in competition, I should have been wondering if these details would matter if it was a dude, if this momentous fall from grace (to the No. 2 ranked female singles tennis player in the world) would matter at all? (I don’t know! I am just asking.) I was not thinking about this imbalanced vocabulary. I was thinking, Could Naomi Osaka kill me if she wanted to? Because the thing about assassins is not that they can kill on command, using whatever raw materials they have nearby, like, just off the top of my head, a tennis racket and a rubber ball, but that deep inside of them there is a small and impenetrable black box that operates according to an unknowable logic. Osaka has been interviewed more times in her 21 years than most adults have taken baths, and she has played countless more tennis matches, and nobody — on the other side of the microphone or the net — can anticipate what the black box will say or do next.
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Post by Admin on Jul 25, 2019 17:44:04 GMT
Naomi Osaka throws first pitch for Los Angeles Dodgers
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