Latvia is not a noted country of tennis greats, but in the last few days this small European nation has made some waves on the court.
The first was at Delray Beach over the weekend where Latvia’s top ranked player, Ernests Gulbis, claimed his first ATP Tour title with victory over the 6ft 10in Ivo Karlovic in the final.
With that, Gulbis – who was already the first Latvian tennis player to reach the top 100 and then the top 50, with a career-high ranking of world No. 38 achieved in August 2008 – became the first player from that nation to win an ATP title.
As a result of that win, the 21-year-old pocketed 280 ranking points and jumped 27 places in the world rankings to world No. 45.
Gulbis came to the attention of the tennis public a couple of years ago now, when he reached the quarter-finals at Roland Garros in 2008, along the way recording a second round defeat of then world No. 8 James Blake before the then world No. 3 Novak Djokovic finally stopped his run.
It all conspires to make Gulbis the greatest tennis player to emerge from Latvia, and he’s so far had little competition from the title from either the men (the Latvian player with the next highest ATP ranking is world No. 340 Andis Juska) or the women.
That might be about to change if anything can be read into 19-year-old Anastasija Sevastova’s first-round victory over top seed Jelena Jankovic at the Monterrey Open. Is that win a portent of things to come?
The WTA’s 72nd ranked player completed the upset over Jankovic in three sets, finally securing a 5-7, 6-4 6-4 victory over the former world No. 1. It was the teenager’s first victory against a top-10 player in three attempts and though Jankovic’s form has been mixed, credit must be given to Sevastova for coming from behind to win the second and third sets against the world No. 9.
Like Gulbis, Sevastova is the lone Latvian in the top 100 and indeed is the country’s only representative in the top 500, which means the Davis Cup and Fed Cup might be a struggle for this nation. In some ways it is, but things are heading in the right direction.
The women are represented in the Europe/Africa Zone Group I in 2011, but the good news is that’s a consolidation of the place the team won in that tier of the competition for 2010 after back-to-back promotions.
In the Davis Cup, the men are due to take on Ukraine later in the week in the Europe/Africa Zone Group I, after securing their promotion back to this level of the competition last year. It’s an unlikely scenario given the nation’s comparative lack of depth, but if Latvia can get on a winning roll they can theoretically win through to the World Group for 2011.
Perhaps it’s Sevastova’s win over Jankovic that says most about Latvia’s rising fortunes, because it wasn’t so long ago that Serbia, another Eastern European nation, was far from a tennis superpower. Today though, they’ve had two players ranked at No. 1 (Jankovic and Ana Ivanovic) and two Grand Slam champions (Novak Djokovic at the 2008 Australian Open and Ivanovic at the 2008 French Open). In both the Fed Cup and Davis Cup, Serbia secured its place in the highest tier of the competition in 2010.
It’s fair to say Latvia’s a little way from experiencing the same level of on-court success as the Serbs, but if recent results are any guide, Gulbis and Sevastova might be about to put their nation’s name firmly on the tennis map.
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