Jelena Jankovic retires from Slovenia Open due to injury
For a professional athlete, nothing can be worse than getting injured and not being able to play their respective sport. Lots of professional athletes have faced a major downfall in their career due to various injuries and their inability to recover.
Jelena Jankovic is a Serbian professional tennis player. She has been a former world number one and is currently ranked as world number two. The Serb has made it to the finals at the 2008 US Open and has reached the semi-finals at the Australian and French Open. She made a breakthrough in her career when she won the mixed doubles title at Wimbledon in 2007. This made her the first Serbian tennis player to have ever won a grand Slam title.
Lately the professional Serbian tennis player, Jelena Jankovic had been participating at the Slovenia Open which is being held in Portoroz. This has been the first tournament she has participated in after Wimbledon. Jankovic entered this tournament as the number one seed and was one of the expected champions of this tournament.
At the end of the first round, the top seed managed to overthrow her opponent, who was the teenage Serbian player Bojana Jovanovski, to make her way into the second round. Jovanovski, who is ranked world number 93, gave Jankovic a fair fight during the match but she was unable to keep up her strength against the more experienced player. This allowed Jankovic to claim a straight set victory, 6-3 and 6-3 over the young Jovanovski.
After breezing past her opponent in the first round, Jankovic was scheduled to face Anastasiya Yakimova in the second round. Yakimova is a professional tennis player from Belarus and her current tennis ranking is world number 143. Being up against world number two was indeed a challenge for this Belarusian player. There was a high probability that Yakimova would be defeated by Jankovic who is ranked much higher. Unfortunately, during the match in the second round Jankovic was hit by what is every athlete’s worst nightmare; an injury.
This match between Jankovic and Yakimova was going to decide who would be progressing into the quarterfinals of the tournament. At the start of the match, the Serb player was doing quite well. She was in lead, 6-1 2-1, against the Belarus qualifier Yakimova. Things looked bright for Jankovic until she took a wrong step while chasing the ball and twisted her ankle. After getting some medical help, the top seed decided to go on with the match but the pain in her ankle persisted due to which she could not keep up her good performance.
As she continued to play, she lost the second set, 6-3, to her opponent. Her attempt to move forward in the match failed and she finally gave up any hope of winning at the beginning of the third set and retired handing over victory to Yakimova. This will be Yakimova’s third career WTA quarterfinals this year, and now she will be up against the Russian Ksenia Pervak in the quarterfinals.
This is not the first time an injury has jeopardized the professional tennis career of Jelena Jankovic. She had still been recovering from an arm injury she had faced last year. Also, just before the Slovenia Open, this tennis star had been seeded number four at Wimbledon. She had to withdraw from Wimbledon in the quarterfinals because of extreme back pain which did not let her play properly.
The Serbian tennis princess had seen the Slovenia Open as a chance to win back her form and to prepare herself for the upcoming US Open. However, luck was not on Jankovic’s side and it looks like she needs to start playing a more careful game of tennis and watch her step in order to make her way through a tournament without getting injured.
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