The cream rose to the top at Atlanta last week as top seed and defending champion John Isner and second seed Nick Kyrgios reached Sunday’s final. Kyrgios prevailed in the final beating Isner 7-6 7-6 for his second ATP Tour title of the season after winning Marseille indoors earlier this year.
Both the men’s and women’s Olympic tennis tournament got underway on Saturday and there were no major upsets on the men’s side, apart from 14th seed Jack Sock, who crashed out in straight sets against Japan’s Taro Daniel. Defending Olympic champion and second seed Andy Murray got his campaign off to a winning start seeing off Serbia’s Victor Troicki in straight sets and at the time of writing top-seed Djokovic was due to play his first round match against Del Potro in the early hours of Monday morning.
Britain’s Heather Watson made a winning start to her Olympic campaign on Saturday knocking out veteran Shuai Peng and there were also handful of big first round upsets in the women’s draw on Saturday. Fourth seed Radwanska from Poland crashed out against Zheng from China in straight sets, fifth seed American Venus Williams was knocked out by Flipkens from Belgium, sixth seed Italian Roberta Vinci crashed out in straight sets against Schmiedlova from Slovakia and 12th seed Bacsinszky from Switzerland found Zhang from China too good.
Yesterday defending Olympic champion and top-seed Serena Williams from the USA got her Olympic campaign off to a winning start beating Gavrilova from Australia, as did second seed Kerber from Germany beating Duque-Marino from Columbia, eighth seed Kuznetsova from Russia knocked out Niculescu from Romania and Eleventh seed Kvitova of the Czech Republic knocked out Babos of Hungary.
On to this week’s ATP action and we have one tournament, which is a new event, played in the beautiful peninsula of Los Cabos, Mexico. There is no historical tournament data to go on with it being a new event so I will just give you my thoughts on a couple of potential finalists and winners.
Third seed Ivo Karlovic (7/1) at the ripe old age of 37 is having a great season to date. He won his seventh ATP title recently at Newport recently and went on to reach his first ATP 500 final at Washington the following week (lost to Monfils). He has the luxury of a first round bye so will only need to win three matches to reach the final this week. He’s got a winning head-to-head record against the main dangers in the bottom half of the draw Tomic and Verdasco and if he can repeat his recent form he’ll be tough to beat this week.
