No Coco Gauff, Iga Swiatek Has Great Chance To Win Gold For The 2024 Olympics
JAKARTA - The women's singles Paris 2024 Olympic tennis sport has entered the semifinals.
The world number one, Iga Swiatek, still maintains hopes of winning a gold medal along with three other names, Zheng Qinwen (China), Anna Karolina Schmiedlova (Slovakia, and Donna Vekic (Croatia).
Swiatek is clearly a strong candidate to become a champion. The journey of the Polish tennis player is fairly consistent.
He made it through the first to third round nicely. Swiatek can always get out of pressure to turn things around.
In the third round, for example, Swiatek managed to escape great pressure from Wang Xiyu (China) to win a ticket to the quarter-finals.
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When Wang threatened to take the match to the third set, Swiatek appeared calm and full of determination to win 6-3 and 6-4.
His move to the last eight made him the first Polish player to reach the Olympic quarter-finals.
If the four-time French Open champion manages to reach the top of the 2024 Olympic podium, Swiatek will be the second player after Steffi Graf in 1988, who won Roland Garros and the Olympics in the same year.
The prediction is not without reason. Swiatek's strongest opponent, Coco Gauff, has been eliminated in the third round by Donna Vekic.
Vekic's victory also led him to become the first Croatian player to reach the Olympic women's singles quarter-finals since 1996.
In fact, Vekic was able to maintain his steps until the semifinals. He has been challenged by Schmiedlova to fight for a final ticket.
Anna Karolina Schmiedlova cannot be underestimated by Vekic. The Slovak tennis player managed to stop his fourth seed or fifth-placed journey, Jasmine Paolini (Italy), in the third round.
Schmiedlova, who is not seeded and has a long-ranked rank, namely 67 in the world, then overthrows the ninth seed from the Republic of Ceska, Barbora Krejcikova, in the final stage.
Meanwhile, Swiatek will face another Chinese player in the semifinals, Zheng Qinwen.
Zheng, who is now ranked seventh in the world, is Swiatek's toughest competitor compared to two other names. Only Zheng and Swiatek are in the top 10 of the world.
Zheng's steps were also not kidding. He managed to follow in Li Na's footsteps to reach the semifinals of the Olympics.
Li Na is China's first women's singles player to break into the top four at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.