Sonay Kartal shines in Wimbledon spotlight to clinch best grand slam result
The 23-year-old from Brighton roared into the fourth round after sweeping aside French qualifier Diane Parry.
She is in the last 16 of a grand slam for the first time in her career after a sizzling 6-4 6-2 victory.
When Jack Draper was knocked out by Marin Cilic on Thursday he admitted the expectation levels surrounding home players made him realise just how big two-time winner Andy Murray's achievements were.
But laid-back Kartal is taking all the hype in her stride as she prepares for a crack at Russian veteran Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova for a place in the quarter-finals.
'I enjoy it. I think it's an honour,' she said. 'Obviously if you've got a lot of attention on you, it means you're doing good things.
'I'm pretty calm and pretty collected. I don't think it's going to affect me too much. But no, I'm just enjoying it all. I'll still pretty young. It's my first fourth round.
'I feel like I'm going to go out on the court in the next round kind of with nothing to lose at the minute. I'm going to go swinging.
'I think the pressure that I'll feel is the pressure I will be putting on myself just wanting to perform as best as I can.'
Kartal, ranked 298 this time last year, is on the cusp of the top 50 and could even finish the tournament as British number one, usurping Emma Raducanu and Katie Boulter.
She is the fourth unseeded British woman to reach the fourth round this century after Laura Robson, Heather Watson and Raducanu.
Kartal has been shining on Court Three this week but on Friday she was first up on Court One, the scene of her defeat by Coco Gauff at the same stage last year.
She made a nervous start, falling 4-1 behind, but then won the next nine games to move a set and 4-0 up on her way to a hugely impressive victory in an hour and 22 minutes.
'I'm not going to lie, I was pretty nervous walking out there,' she added. 'It's a big court with a match that has a lot of meaning to me.
'Obviously last year, that was also in the back of my mind, losing to Coco on the same court in the same round.
'I tried to take everything I learnt from that match and put it into play on the court, tried to relax as best as I could.
'When I got it level, I felt like I was pretty good. The nerves were gone. I just felt super comfortable out there.'
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39 minutes ago
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Wimbledon tennis champion Arthur Ashe and South Africa: 'The first free black man I'd ever seen'
Fifty years ago Arthur Ashe pulled off an amazing feat, upsetting the odds and becoming the first black man to win the Wimbledon Men's final when he beat fellow American Jimmy Connors - but it was not something he wanted to define his fight to break down barriers around racial discrimination was closer to his heart - and apartheid South Africa became one of his battle grounds."I don't want to be remembered in the final analysis for having won Wimbledon... I take applause for having done it, but it's not the most important thing in my life - not even close," he said in a BBC interview a year before his death in his Centre Court victory on 5 July 1975 was hailed as one of those spine-tingling sporting moments that stopped everyone in their tracks, whether a tennis fan or not, and it is being commemorated with a special display at the Wimbledon was already in his 30s, tall, serene and with a quiet and even-tempered demeanour. 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The 13-year-old Mathabane made the train journey to get there and join scores of other black - and mostly young - people who had turned out to see the tennis star, who they had given the nickname "Sipho"."He may have been honorary white to white people, but to us black people he was Sipho. It's a Zulu word for gift," Mathabane, now aged 64, told the BBC."You know, a gift from God, from the ancestors, meaning that this is very priceless, take care of it. Sipho is here, Sipho from America is here." The excitement generated at the Soweto clinic was not just contained to that township but had spread across the country, he rural reservations to shebeens or speakeasies (bars) - wherever black people gathered, they were talking about Ashe's visit."For me, he was literally the first free black man I'd ever seen," said the 1973 tour, Ashe went back to South Africa a few more times. 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The ambition is to produce a tennis star and Grand Slam champion from the township - and legends such as Serena and Venus Williams have since run clinics Mothobi Seseli and Masodi Xaba, who were once both South African national junior champions and now sit on the AASTC board, the centre goes beyond feel that fundamentally it is about instilling a work ethic that embraces a range of life skills and self-belief."We're building young leaders," Ms Xaba, a successful businesswoman, told the Seseli, an entrepreneur born and raised in Soweto, agrees that this would be Ashe's vision too: "When I think about what his legacy is, it is believing that we can, at the smallest of scales, move the dial in very big ways."Ashe was initially inclined to challenge apartheid through conversations and participation, believing that by being visible and winning matches in the country he could undermine the very foundation of the his experience within South Africa, and international pressure from the anti-apartheid movement, persuaded him that isolation rather than engagement would be the most effective way to bring about change in South became a powerful advocate and supporter of an international sporting boycott of South Africa, speaking before the United Nations and the US 1983, at a joint press conference set up by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and UN, he spoke about the aims of the Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid, which he had just co-founded with the American singer Harry Belafonte. The organisation lobbied for sanctions against the South African government, and at its height had more than 500 joined many protests and rallies, and when he was arrested outside the South African embassy in Washington DC in 1985, it drew more international attention to the cause and helped to amplify global condemnation of the South African was the captain of the US Davis Cup team at the time, and always felt that the arrest cost him his used his platform to confront social injustice wherever he saw it, not just in Africa and South Africa, but also in the US and was also an educator on many issues, and specifically HIV/Aids, which he succumbed to, after contracting the disease from a blood transfusion during heart surgery in the early he had a particular affinity with South Africa's black population living under a repressive said that he identified with them because of his upbringing in racially segregated Richmond in the US state of wonder then that Ashe was one of the key figures that South African anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela was keen to meet on a trip to New York, inviting him to a historic townhall gathering in 1990 shortly after his release from 27 years in pair met on a few occasions, however Ashe did not live to see Mandela become president of South Africa following the 1994 election, which brought in democratic rule and the dismantling of like Ashe, Mandela was able to use sport to push for change - by helping unify South Africa - notably during the 1995 Rugby World Cup when he famously wore the Springbok jersey, once a hated symbol of apartheid. To celebrate this year's anniversary of Ashe's victory, the Wimbledon Championships have an installation in the International Tennis Centre tunnel and a new museum display about him. They are also taking a trailblazer workshop on the road to mark his Wimbledon title was the third of his Grand Slam crowns, having previously won the US and Australian to many people like Mathabane - who in 1978 became the first black South African to earn a tennis scholarship to a US university - Arthur Ashe's legacy was his activism, not his tennis."He was literally helping to liberate my mind from those mental chains of self-doubt, of believing the big lie about your inferiority and the fact that you're doomed to repeat the work of your parents as a drudge," he said."So that was the magic - because he was showing me possibilities." You may also be interested in: 'I'm not afraid of dying': The pioneering tennis champion who told the world he had AidsArthur Ashe's 1976 interview: 'Fighting the myth''Growing up black' made Arthur Ashe crave control Go to for more news from the African us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Raducanu justifies primetime billing even as Sabalenka's superpower wins out
It's a little after 8pm by the time the first ball is tossed. Karen Khachanov has just beaten Nuno Borges on No 3 Court and so even before it has started Emma Raducanu v Aryna Sabalenka is the last game on anywhere at Wimbledon: a standalone attraction, the roof not so much closed as hermetically sealed. We are locked in, under these hot lights, until nightfall. And of course this is not simply a third-round game. At the behest of the broadcasters this is also a primetime television product, an item of light entertainment. Raducanu isn't just battling the world No 1 here, she's up against Gardeners' World on BBC Two. The hill is packed. Brian Cox and Mary Berry in the Royal Box are transfixed. And to think Roland Garros would probably have put this match on in mid-morning. But something about Raducanu in primetime still feels a touch incongruous, and not only because of her world ranking of 45. For this is not instinctively a player you associate with edge-of-the-seat drama or vintage comebacks. Usually Raducanu wins in a hurry and loses in a hurry. She has never won a third set at Wimbledon. So in a way, for all she has achieved, this is a player still awaiting her big homecoming, her Centre Court splash. None of which, of course, has stopped people from trying to confect drama around her. Sonay Kartal's progress to the fourth round has been met with a deluge of Raducanu-themed headlines. 'Kartal steps out of Raducanu's shadow', 'Raducanu's old rival', 'overtakes Raducanu in the rankings', and so on. Cameron Norrie has just been asked in his press conference whether he is dating Raducanu. One stalker has already been banned from the grounds, but others, it seems, are still walking around with lanyards around their necks. On Wednesday after beating Marketa Vondrousova she described a moment when her fug of concentration lifted for a second and the scale of it all suddenly hit her all at once – the crowd, the court, the occasion, what it all would mean – and briefly forgot how she was going to hit the ball. What must it feel like to live in this glare, to sense that tremendous rumbling noise every time you walk to practice or log on to the internet, to stay sane and competent in a world where the walls are constantly trying to collapse in on you? Perhaps Raducanu's real achievement has been simply to function, to build herself a palace of the mind strong enough to allow her not just to work but to thrive. To know that you're the last game of the day, and know why, and yet still to put in your greatest ever Wimbledon performance and your best against a top-10 player. To face down everything else out there and still have the strength to face down the most ferocious hitter in the game. And though it was a straight-sets defeat, there was enough here to show the rest of us what she had always believed herself. She saves seven set points in a remarkable 10th game as Sabalenka tries to pummel her to bits. She breaks, is broken courtesy of a slip and a lethal net cord, loses a heartbreakingly tight breaker. She's elusive, courageous, clever. It's past 9pm and Raducanu is now competing with Celebrity Gogglebox and Not Going Out, which has been moved to BBC Two. But of course Sabalenka, too, has added levels to her game. She serves more consistently, gets more revs on her ground strokes, drops more, comes to the net more, thinks her way through matches better. Above all she possesses what has always been Raducanu's superpower: the ability to intuit the momentum shift before it happens, to find the point of weakness that can upend the match entirely. Facing points for a 5-1 double break, she finds big first serves, finds the corners, wins five games in a row for the match. Occasionally very smart and very brave people on the internet like to argue that Raducanu is basically some manufactured confidence trick, that it's somehow possible to win a US Open by dumb fluke. But then along come matches such as this to remind us: actually, no. Emma Raducanu gets a lot of hype because Emma Raducanu is capable of playing a frighteningly high level of tennis. The only question worth asking is how she can unlock it more frequently. It's beyond 10pm. The news has been pushed back and Raducanu is now competing with First Dates on Channel 4. She should be pleased, she should be proud, but as she departs she looks crestfallen. And of course it should hurt to come this close, to get so many opportunities and ultimately to fall short. But when the dust settles she will know that she truly belongs in this company: a primetime performer for a primetime slot.
