Category: Tennis

• Briton ‘toughed it out’ to earn 6-4, 7-5 quarter-final win

• Physio checked on Raducanu as temperature hit 36C

Emma Raducanu booked her place in the semi-finals of the Washington Open for the first time with a 6-4, 7-5 win over Greece’s Maria Sakkari on a day where both players had to battle high temperatures.

After losing the opening game, Raducanu dropped serve but managed to break straight back. Raducanu broke again to make it 4-3 courtesy of a scuffed drop-volley by Sakkari, who fought back once more following another double fault by the Briton. After getting her nose in front again, Raducanu held serve to take the opening set.

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• Venus Williams loses to Magdalena Frech in DC

• Williams, 45, was chasing first streak since 2019

• Raducanu beats Osaka; Fernandez ousts Pegula

Venus Williams’ bid for her first winning streak since 2019 ended with a 6-2, 6-2 loss to 24th-ranked Magdalena Frech at the DC Open on Thursday night.

Williams is 45, and her victory in the first round Tuesday night against 35th-ranked Peyton Stearns made the seven-time grand slam singles champion the oldest woman to win a tour-level singles match since Martina Navratilova was 47 in 2004.

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• Briton wins 6-4, 6-2 to make last eight in Washington

• Cameron Norrie and Dan Evans go out in straight sets

Emma Raducanu will reclaim the British No 1 ranking after winning her first meeting with the four-time grand slam champion Naomi Osaka in confident fashion. The clash was hotly anticipated but proved to be not that much of a contest, with Raducanu comfortably clinching a 6-4, 6-2 victory to reach the quarter-finals of the Citi Open in Washington.

Speaking on Sky Sports, Raducanu said: “I thought it was going to be a really difficult match. Naomi’s won four slams, she’s been world No 1, won Masters [titles]. She’s so dangerous and on the hard courts I think she’s particularly comfortable. I knew I was going to have to play really well and manage my own service games, which I’m really proud of how I did.

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• Player served three-month suspension over positive test

• Umberto Ferrara blamed incident on physiotherapist

The Wimbledon men’s singles champion Jannik Sinner has reappointed his former fitness coach Umberto Ferrara with immediate effect, the Italian world No 1 confirmed on Wednesday.

Sinner parted ways with Ferrara and physiotherapist Giacomo Naldi last year following the investigation into his positive tests for banned substance clostebol.

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• Briton pulls through gruelling encounter to advance

• Norrie reaches men’s last 16 after seeing off Musetti

Emma Raducanu began her buildup towards next month’s US Open with an impressive straight-sets win over seventh seed Marta Kostyuk at the DC Open in Washington.

Playing her first singles match since stretching world No 1 Aryna Sabalenka in the third round of Wimbledon, Raducanu held off the Ukrainian world No 27 to pull through a gruelling encounter 7-6 (4), 6-4.

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• Williams, 45, earns first singles win since 2023

• Oldest WTA winner since Navratilova in 2004

• Beatsworld No 35 Stearns after 16-month layoff

Venus Williams wanted to send a message – to herself and to others – about coming back from a long layoff, about competing in a sport at age 45, about never giving up. Yes, there was something special about just being back on a tennis court Tuesday night.

There also was this: She really, really wanted to win.

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• Former world No 13 completes first ATP Tour match in four months

• Australian joins Gael Monfils in first-round doubles defeat at DC Open

Nick Kyrgios has come through his first match since March, and just his sixth this year, completing almost an hour on court in a men’s doubles defeat at the ATP Tour’s DC Open.

Partnering French veteran Gael Monfils, and playing in front of NBA star Kevin Durant, Kyrgios had a tough opening draw against third seeds Edouard Roger-Vasselin and Hugo Nys.

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• Tennis player suspended for second time after Cas appeal

• Moore blamed contaminated meat for failed drug test

The British tennis player Tara Moore, who was previously cleared of an anti-doping rule violation, has been handed a four-year ban after the court of arbitration for sport upheld an appeal filed by the International Tennis Integrity Agency.

Moore, Britain’s former No 1-ranked doubles player, was provisionally suspended in June 2022 owing to the presence of prohibited anabolic steroids nandrolone and boldenone in a blood sample.

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In the fevered environments within sporting arenas, anything that can help an official has to be a good thing

We are all suckers for a good story. And there was certainly a cracking two‑parter at Wimbledon this year. First came the news that 300 line judges had been replaced by artificial intelligence robots. Then, a few days later, it turned out there were some embarrassing gremlins in the machine. Not since Roger Federer hung up his Wilson racket has there been a sweeter spot hit during the Wimbledon fortnight.

First the new electronic line-judging system failed to spot that Sonay Kartal had whacked a ball long during her match against Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova – which led to the Russian losing a game she otherwise would have won. Although, ironically, it happened only because an official had accidentally switched the system off.

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Italian overcame heartbreak in French Open final and now moves on to his favoured hard courts for US Open buildup

With his hopes of a third consecutive Wimbledon title desperately fading with every point, Carlos Alcaraz sat down in his chair on Centre Court after conceding the third set of his final with Jannik Sinner and bluntly unloaded his thoughts on his team: “From the back of the court, he is much better than me. Much better than me! Much [better]! It’s like this,” Alcaraz said, gesturing with his hands to demonstrate the vast gap between his greatest rival and himself.

His assessment was not wrong. From a set down, Sinner put together a supreme performance to overturn five consecutive losses against Alcaraz and win his first Wimbledon title, avenging the most difficult loss in his career – his French Open final defeat by Alcaraz in June – at the earliest opportunity. No one in the world strikes the ball with anything close to the destructive power, cleanliness, consistency that the Italian employs to dominate on the court and he used his incessant aggression to constantly rob time from his opponent, making it so difficult for him to impose his own varied game.

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Our photographer looks back at two glorious weeks of tennis in SW19 and has picked out some of his favourite photos from the thousands he took during Wimbledon 2025. The tournament culminated with two new names being engraved on the singles winners’ trophies as Iga Swiatek and Jannik Sinner added the Wimbledon titles to their previous grand slam victories

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After suffering a heartbreaking defeat to Carlos Alcaraz in the French Open final, Jannik Sinner rebounds to beat him in the Wimbledon final, taking the title by three sets to one

“Fritz was asked to compare the two after the semi-final,” writes Kerrith Britland. “He said something along the lines of Sinner is more predictable but a more consistently big ball striker, while Alcaraz has more access to angles but can go massive too.

While I think the RG loss would’ve been tough to swallow for Sinner, I don’t think he expected to do as well as he did after the three months out and against Alcaraz on his favoured surface. I reckon he wants this one bad though. With that Dimitrov bullet dodged, Sinner might think the powers that be are on his side today.

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