Jelena Dokic makes case for US Open wildcard
Jelena Dokic has taken another step towards gaining a wildcard into the US Open after clinching the title in her third consecutive ITF Challenger tournament.
It’s a marked turn-around in form for the Australian since Wimbledon, where she was defeated in the second round of qualifying by a player ranked as the world No. 569, and a return to the Challenger circuit has yielded titles in Bucharest, Contrexeville and most recently Vancouver to leave Dokic on a 15-match winning streak.
It’s a run that has also seen Dokic make her return to the top 100 and must have given Tennis Australia some pause for thought with regard to allocating their discretionary wildcard into the women’s draw at the US Open after Dokic missed the cut when the initial field was announced late last month.
Dokic secured the VanOpen women’s singles title with a 6-1, 6-4 over another former top-20 player in Virginie Razzano, another who is attempting to find her spark on the Challenger circuit after dropping out of the top-100, and has been quick to credit her new coach Glen Schaap (a former member of Ana Ivanovic’s camp whom Dokic has been working with for the past few months) for her rediscovered form.
It’s form that has seen the 27-year-old move to a ranking of world No. 82 on the back of her latest tournament victory after arriving in Vancouver as the world No. 96, and marks another upward swing on the rollercoaster that has been Dokic’s career.
As a precociously talented teen, Dokic reached the giddy heights of a Wimbledon semi-final in 2000 and a career-high ranking of world No. 4 in 2002, but things had started to go wrong even before then, with father and coach Damir Dokic calling the shots as the player dramatically turned her back on her adopted country to return to Yugoslavia in 2001.
Dokic ultimately split with her now estranged father, enlisted the coaching assistance of Borna Bikić, and began a career tailspin that saw her finish 2006 – the year she represented Australia again after a five-year break – ranked as the world No. 621.
After years in the tennis wilderness, Dokic (still with Bikic in her box) won back Australian fans with a determined showing at the Australian Open, riding a wave of emotion to reach the quarter-finals, but it was to be a short-lived renaissance, with injury and glandular fever ensuring the highlight of her year would come at Melbourne Park.
As ever, there was to be no fairytale for Dokic, and 2010 had, until her last three tournaments at least, been disappointing, but her current purple patch provides yet another reason to hope that she could yet again make some inroads towards living up to that early potential in the latter stages of her career.
And judging on recent form, surely the next chance she’ll have to do so will be at the US Open this August and September.
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