At Coronavirus United States Tennis Open, the one with the masks, the bubble, the social distance and the minimum contact, nobody has given the trophy to Naomi Osaka. She has had to take it herself from a table, on a practically empty court, in a subdued ceremony, almost somber in tone. But circumstances do not change history. Ante Victoria AzarenkaAfter starting the final in a terrible way, the 22-year-old Japanese has won 1-6, 6-3 and 6-3 and has returned to conquer Flushing Meadows, where two years ago he broke into the top against Serena Williams. It is already his third big. And because of his tennis, his age and his mentality, it is clear that many more can come.
His triumph has once again left Azarenka, the double champion of Australia and former number one, at the gates of the New York title, who has already played two finals in New York in 2012 and 2013. And has removed the finishing touch to the glorious return in the last weeks of ‘Fault‘, a transformed 31-year-old tennis player who, as shown in Flushing Meadows, seven years after that golden era, deserves her space again among the best.
A bad start
During the 26 minutes that the first set lasted and at the start of the second, it seemed inevitable that the Belarusian would culminate that feat, which would have been especially sweet after the drought of more than a year of titles. The mother since 2016 was again the relentless tennis player who in her semifinal had finished with Serena Williams. And he had no rival. But Osaka reacted, moved, as she explained later, by the thought that “it would be embarrassing to lose in less than an hour”. And they reappeared the bright kick of the Japanese, her strength, his concentration. In the third game of the second set, he took advantage of his first opportunity to break Azarenka’s serve. And there was no going back.
Even in the third set, when the Belarusian showed her philosophy that nothing is lost while the ball is in play and regained Osaka’s advantage in the seventh game, the Japanese immediately took away her hopes, breaking as well. And in one hour and 53 minutes she sealed the match, becoming the first tennis player since Arantxa Sánchez Vicario in 1994 against Steffi Graf to win the US Open after losing the first set.
Double win
It was a real reconquista, especially welcome for a young athlete who started the year in Australia far from its best moments. And Osaka has achieved it while becoming the greatest exponent in the tennis of the protests by athletes against racial injustice and police brutality against blacks in America.
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Already in the Flushing bubble, when Cincinnati was held prior to the Open, he forced a day of pause in the game by joining the historic boycott of athletes in the US for the case of Jacob Blake, a black man who was shot seven times by the police in Kenosha (Wisconsin). And in the great Osaka, with a Haitian father and a Japanese mother, He has worn a mask with the name of a victim of racism every day.
This Saturday Arthur Ashe took to the track remembering Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy who was killed by police in Cleveland in 2014 with a plastic gun in your hands. When Osaka was asked at the awards ceremony on the track what message he wanted to send these days, he intelligently replied to his interlocutor: “What message did you get?“Because that has been his idea with his gesture every day: that people become aware,” make people speak. ” And his triumph in New York has not only been tennis.
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