Top 20 breakthroughs in professional tennis circuit this year: Part 14 – Tennis Special
2. Victoria Azarenka (Belarus)
It is widely said that women professional tennis lacks consistency and the world rankings keep shuffling very quickly. Well, to a certain degree, I also believe that it is true and female tennis stars are not as consistent as the
male professionals are in terms of sustaining their world rankings. However, when I look at someone like the Belarusian beauty queen, Victoria Azarenka, such thoughts are wiped out of my mind immediately.
Are you looking for an example of consistency, power, technique, character, aggression and resilience in women’s tennis? Then it would be better to end your search and just look at Azarenka. What a player she has become in the
current season. The most dominating, the most aggressive and certainly one of the most consistent performers of the 2012 WTA season, Azarenka has reached the apex of her tennis career this year. She has been holding the world number one spot for a significant
portion of the running season and her sublime form clearly suggests that she will remain on top of the women’s rankings by the end of the circuit as well.
Taking of this year as the third ranked contender, the 23-year-old Diva didn’t has to wait for long to have her first major breakthrough of the season for long. She bagged the season-opening Apia International Sydney trophy to
generate some momentum and went to Melbourne to play the Grand Slam Down Under with all her guns blazing. Azarenka blasted her way to her first Grand Slam final and outmuscled the former world number one, Maria Sharapova, to earn the Australian Open crown.
It wasn’t just her first Grand Slam title, her triumph also propelled to the world number one spot.
Azarenka kept cruising through the WTA Tour, bagging the opening four tournaments of the season and riding a 26-match winning streak. She was victorious in Sydney, Melbourne, Doha and Indian Wells when she suffered her first defeat
of the year in the quarter-finals of Miami Masters, at the hands of Marion Bartoli. She featured the title match at Stuttgart but lost to Sharapova this time. She came back very strongly in the very next WTA premier-level event in Madrid but again fell to
Serena Williams in the final match.
Her consistency to reach the quarter-final and semi-finals stages didn’t went down a bit in the following tournaments but she had to suffer some upsetting outcomes in some tournaments as well. Her fourth-round exit from French
Open allowed Sharapova to claim the Grand Slam title and snatch the world number one spot from Azarenka. However, the Belarusian took merely a month to regain her throne back, after a semi-final run at Wimbledon Championships.
Azarenka’s dominance on the tennis courts was brutally massacred by the return of the former world number one, Serena Williams, to the WTA Tour after a long injury lay-off. She lost to the American powerhouse in the semi-finals
of Wimbledon, in the round of four at London Olympics and then in the huge title matchup of the US Open Grand Slam championships.
The top ranked Belarusian recently returned to form by winning two back-to-back championship titles at Beijing and Linz, strengthening her position on the apex of the WTA Premier Rankings. Azarenka has bagged six WTA championship
titles this season so far, speaking of her destructive form and her true class as a champion. I wish I could put her on the top of my list of tennis breakthroughs this season but there is someone else who has got that number one spot. He/she will be revealed
in the last part of this series coming up next!
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the writer's own and in no way represent Bettor.com's official editorial policy.
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