World No. 170 Sonay Kartal Becomes the Lowest-Ranked WTA 1000 Finalist in Wuhan

The lowest-ranked player left in the Wuhan draw is the one playing in its final. Sonay Kartal, world No. 170, beat Jelena Ostapenko 7-6 (11/9), 7-6 (7-5) on Saturday to become the lowest-ranked finalist in the history of the WTA 1000 format, AFP reports. She did it the hard way twice in the same match, coming back from 4-1 down in both sets against a former French Open champion who hit 50 winners and still lost.

What record did Sonay Kartal set in Wuhan?

A format record that had stood since 2009. No player ranked as low as No. 170 has reached a WTA 1000 final since the tier was introduced, AFP reports, and Kartal is also the first British finalist in the Wuhan Open’s history. Women’s Tennis Blog adds the longer view: she is only the second British player to reach a final at this level since 1990, following Johanna Konta, who made three of them. Records like this usually belong to teenagers on the way up. Kartal’s belongs to a 24-year-old on the way back, which is what separates it from a trivia line. The ranking next to her name this week describes a player who was not allowed to play for six months, not the player who then beat three seeds in a row.

How did she beat Ostapenko from 4-1 down in both sets?

By refusing to lose the same set twice. Ostapenko led 4-1 in the first set and served for it twice, and led 4-1 again in the second, Women’s Tennis Blog reports. The opener ran 72 minutes and ended 11-9 in a tiebreak in which Kartal saved two set points after squandering two of her own. The second set followed the same script with the numbers moved around: Kartal won three straight games from 1-4 to level at 4-4, saved three set points, and took the tiebreak 7-5, AFP reports. Across the match Ostapenko hit 50 winners, the kind of total that normally buries a defensive player. Kartal’s own summary was about the one thing the winners could not measure. Mentally, I think this is one of the best performances I’ve had in my career, she said. I’m very proud of that one, AFP reports.

Who else did Kartal beat to reach the final?

Almost nobody unseeded, on a court she had never played on before this week. Wuhan was Kartal’s tournament debut, and her run went through Anhelina Kalinina, ninth seed Belinda Bencic, Jasmine Paolini and Elina Svitolina, Women’s Tennis Blog reports. The Svitolina win, 6-2, 2-6, 6-4 in the quarter-finals, was the second top-10 victory of her career, and it made her the lowest-ranked semi-finalist in the tournament’s history even before Saturday. The semi-final itself was a rarity of a different kind: only the third all-unseeded semi-final Wuhan has staged, Women’s Tennis Blog reports, between a qualifier-story Briton and an unseeded former Grand Slam champion ranked 35th. In a China swing that has produced a ball-kid warning and a public apology in Shanghai and a racism row around a replayed point at the China Open, Wuhan’s strangest week was hiding in the rankings column.

Why is a player this good ranked No. 170?

Because rankings count the months she missed. Kartal reached a career-high No. 44 fifteen months ago, then suffered a spinal stress fracture that kept her out from March to September this year, AFP reports. A stress fracture in the spine is not an injury a player trains through, and six months without tournaments strips ranking points away in chunks. Wuhan is only her second tour event since she returned, which is the whole explanation for the number that made Saturday’s record possible: the system had no recent results to price her with. Her week has been the correction arriving all at once, five wins against a draw that included the world No. 6. The ranking that gets published after this tournament will start catching up with the player the draw already met.

What does the final hold for Kartal?

Maja Chwalinska, and she arrives with the bigger scalp. The second semi-final paired Iga Swiatek, who arrived in Wuhan chasing both a completed set of WTA 1000 semi-finals and a WTA Finals place she may need this title to reach, against her childhood friend, and Chwalinska won it 7-5, 6-1 after Swiatek’s left-leg injury slowed her in the second set, Reuters reports. So Sunday’s final is a meeting of two first-time WTA 1000 finalists: the world No. 170 and the world No. 22 who just beat the most decorated player of her generation. Kartal has the day’s simpler position: the record is already hers, the ranking repair is already done, and Sunday is a free shot at a WTA 1000 title in her second event back from a broken season. The men’s tour has spent the same fortnight in China generating semi-final drama of its own, from Arthur Gea’s first top-10 win in Shanghai to a retirement threat over a replay in the other Shanghai semi-final. Kartal’s version needed no controversy at all. It only needed a No. 170 next to her name, and a scoreboard that kept refusing to agree with it.

What happened in the final against Chwalinska? (Update, October 18)

Update, October 18: for a set and a half, the scoreboard kept refusing, and then it stopped. Kartal lost the final 6-2, 4-6, 2-6 to Maja Chwalinska on Sunday, Reuters reports, after leading by a set and a break in the second. She broke early, led 4-1, and took the first set in 45 minutes by overpowering the Pole, Sky Sports reports, then broke early again in the second. Chwalinska’s answer was to change the terms of the rallies: Reuters describes a left-hander deploying a defensive right-handed lob to disrupt Kartal’s flow, with changes of direction and winners into the corners, and Sky Sports records that Kartal had faced more than 50 points on serve by the middle of the second set, against 15 for Chwalinska. The turning point Sky Sports names is the break that put Chwalinska 4-3 up in the second set. Kartal broke straight back for 4-4, but the momentum had moved: Chwalinska broke again, held, and took the final into a decider.

The third set was shared for four games, and then the week charged its price. Sky Sports notes the effects of returning to competition only last month began to show as fatigue set in, and Chwalinska started winning the long rallies she had been losing, closing the match with four straight games, Reuters reports. It is Chwalinska’s first WTA Tour title, in her second final on tour, a day after she beat her childhood friend Iga Swiatek in the semi-final. Kartal’s record stands anyway: the lowest-ranked finalist in WTA 1000 history does not need the trophy for the week to count, and the correction to her ranking arrives on Monday, when Sky Sports reports she becomes the British No. 1 and returns to the top 50. Her own summary matched the week. That was one heck of a battle, she told Chwalinska, adding that she hoped to be in many more of these finals and that the people in her box are the reason she is healthy and back to fitness, Sky Sports reports. A player who arrived at No. 170, in her second event back from a spinal stress fracture, leaves Wuhan as her country’s No. 1. The final was the one match the ranking was right about, and it still took three sets and a comeback to prove it.