Newly-acquired BMW driving skills were of no help to Aravane Rezai against Alisa Kleybanova in their opening match at the Commonwealth Bank Tournament of Champions in Bali.
Together with Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, who was dominated by Ana Ivanovic on Thursday, Rezai practiced reversing, maneuvering and braking in the new wheels of BMW X5 in Bali, but on the tennis court it was Rezai’s opponent who was in control, beating her 6-1 6-2.
Rezai didn’t manage to defend her Bali title, but will always stay in the history of this new WTA tournament, as the winner of the inaugural edition of the Balinese event.
Kleybanova is looking for her third title in Asia this year, after Kuala Lumpur and Seoul. Her next opponent will be the winner of the match between Yanina Wickmayer and Daniela Hantuchova. (photo: © Neal Trousdale)
i saw this match and i think Aravane is a good player actually, maybe just no luck this time 🙂
Seems that Aravane wants to make her comeback in the competition! I read an interview with her a few days ago, she said that mentally she’s finally in a good place and she’s ready to work hard and with people she worked before. So she’s back to the patrick mouratoglou tennis academy where she worked before, but had to leave it because of her father (big news here…). And she said that she’s now independent, able to make her own decision, without the approval of her father. I so hope it’s true! Go Aravane!
btw, what’s with those players and theirs stranges daddies… First Aravane, now Bartoli and her always present daddy, because of whom she’s refusing to play in french team… (Not to mention some other famous exemples from history).
Yes, Maggie, there were way too many famous (and, surely, unknown) examples from history – and, sadly, for many of them it took too long to emotionally recover from the experience and be able to fully develop their true potential. Two of the current examples struggling are Aravane and Jelena Dokic. Let us keep our fingers crossed
for both of them, and for any other girl, coping with the same horrible problem, we may not know of.
Also Bartoli has a little problem with dependance on her daddy, something that may cost her (and probably will) the possibility to compete at the Olympics, since she refuses to play for France without her father being present at camps as her coach and Escude refuse to let her father to be there… Radwanska had the similiar problem, with overbearing father, allways knowing better what she needs. But she decided to go her own way, found a new coach and won 3 titles in only few months! However those problems seems to be far less important than those of Dokic or Rezai. And speaking of Rezai, her comeback is not going so well, she lost in the first round of qualifications to Indian Wells… :/
Diane of Women Who Serve dedicated an article to Aravane’s slump and the problems with her father, but also to Aravane’s contributions to women’s tennis. It’s a nice read: http://womenwhoserve.blogspot.com/2012/03/vanishing-act-of-aravane-rezai.html
I forgot to mention Mirjana Lucic, whose performances/results closely follow those of Aravane Rezai- or, actually, the other way around, since Mirjana is, both in terms of age and experience, older than Aravane. And, yes, Maggie, Marion’s dependence on her daddy is, eh… queer. When recently, at Wimbledon, she made him leave the court, I thought: Wow, Marion – finally! Go, girl, go – take that last, albeit painful, step toward growing up! But, alas, she went back to playing the (seemingly safe) endless chess (mind) games with the daddy-oh… Same with Caroline Wozniacki (on whose relationship with her father/coach I have recently commented). Simply put: there is way too much wrong with parents (i.e. fathers) coaching their children (i.e. daughters) for too long. (The focus is on the father/daughter relationship because there is, as far as I know, only one famous case with the genders reversed, and that one seems to be in the process of being quite successfully and painlessly resolved – kudos to you, Mrs Murray!) There were/are also some queer, and one way or another harmful, same-gender parent-child relationships in the game, but that’s for some other thread, I guess.