17-year-old Victoria Duval, she of six career tour-level matches, upset 2011 champion and 11th seed Samantha Stosur last night. Leave it at that, and it sounds pretty impressive.
But it doesn’t quite convey how impressive the youngster’s path to the second round has been. Duval is ranked just inside the top 300–not high enough to get into the qualifying tournament on that basis. Armed with a wild card, she beat three players, each with considerably more experience than she has.
Reaching a Grand Slam main draw as a qualifying wild card is notable in and of itself. The only one of this year’s nine qualie WCs to reach the main draw, she’s only the 16th woman to do so at the US Open since 1998 and only the 31st woman to do so at any Slam in that time frame.
As we now know, she didn’t stop there, and that sets her further apart. Of the 30 women who previous accomplished the feat, only 11 went on to win a match in the main draw. (Only one of those, Great Britain’s Karen Cross, at Wimbledon in 1997, won two main draw matches.) And only one of those ladies–Yulia Fedossova, who qualified for the US Open in 2006–beat a seed. Her victim was the much less imposing 25th seed, Anabel Medina Garrigues.
Every slam has its share of upsets, but this one goes far beyond that. By beating a former champion and highly-seeded player, Duval did something no woman had done before.
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Yesterday was a good day for American men, who went 5-2. The only victims were Steve Johnson, who struggled with injuries, and junior champion Collin Altamirano, who no one could’ve expected would give Philipp Kohlschreiber much of a fight.
More notable than the simple fact of winning was the manner in which two US men did so. In the battle of opposites, John Isner defeated Filippo Volandri, 6-0 6-2 6-3, and Donald Young knocked out Martin Klizan, 6-1 6-0 6-1.
Isner set all kinds of personal records in the process. Not known for his return game–to put it mildly–Isner had never won a bagel set on hard courts. In fact, until beating Adrian Mannarino in Newport last month, he had never won a set of professional tennis 6-0.
Next, also because of that not-so-pesky return game, Isner tends to lose quite a few games, even when he’s winning. In best-of-five matches, he had never before won a match without dropping at least nine games. (That was at the French in 2010, when he beat Andrey Golubev.) Today he won while giving up only five.
Finally, to reach such a scoreline, Isner broke serve a total of six times. That’s something else he’s never done before. He’s broken five times on a handful of occasions, but never six, unless he did so in Davis Cup, for which stats are more difficult to come by.
Still, it seems likely that Klizan played worse than Volandri did. As you might imagine, Klizan has never lost quite so comprehensively, though he did turn in a similarly abysmal performance in New York three years ago, when he lost to Juan Carlos Ferrero, 6-1 6-3 6-0.
For Young, it was only his third straight-set victory at a slam, regardless of lopsidedness. And it was only the third time he won a Grand Slam match having earned his way into the main draw. His other five wins–all at the US Open–came as a wild card.
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Since we’re talking about all these Americans winning in New York, it seems like a great time to point you toward Colin Davy’s recent effort to quantify home-court advantage in tennis. He finds that home-country players–both men and women–have a slight advantage that cannot be explained by other factors, to the tune of about 2%.
In building jrank, I’ve done some work along the same lines, and arrived at a similar number. (On my old blog, I posted some very crude attempts, not controlling for things like surface, and claimed a much bigger effect. I don’t think I’ve published the details of my more recent efforts.)
As Colin notes, it’s a small effect compared to other sports. (Isner’s love of the USA notwithstanding.) To the extent home-court advantage in tennis stems from officiating bias–a common cause in other sports–the increasing use of Hawkeye would seem to lessen the effect. And oddly, the practice of putting local players on main courts would turn out to be counterproductive. By putting locals on Hawkeye courts, you’re taking away at least one slight advantage.
Colin also suggests comparing different stages of the tournament, which may reveal that umpires have a greater or lesser bias as the stakes get higher. That test occurred to me for a different reason. Travel-related fatigue is a major factor (again, something Colin acknowledges), but it is one that would likely lessen as the tournament goes on. A player might still be jetlagged for his first-round match, but if he wins a couple of rounds, that effect is likely gone.
It’s an interesting field of study, one that is particularly tricky to separate from others–such as travel effects, surface preferences, venue familiarity, and so on. As is so often the case in tennis, it is a topic that has been extensively hashed out for other sports, yet barely researched in ours.
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In case you missed it yesterday afternoon, I tracked every point of the Federer-Zemlja match, and came up with some very detailed serve breakdowns for each player. Check it out.
For officiating bias, would it be mitigated by the fact that umpires at the ATP/WTA level can’t be from the same country as the players?
On travel effects, would there be a way to study if the effect increases/decreases depending on the number of years traveling to a specific city? If you stay at the same house in Wimbledon over a number of years, get your groceries from the same place, it seems like the travel effects would decrease.
Often the officiating bias is attributed to the effect of the home crowd, not that the umpire is necessarily part of the same tribe/race/citizenship/continent as the favored player. Perhaps subconsciously, the argument goes, refs don’t want the ire of the home crowd on close calls.
By travel effects, I was more referring to fatigue from the travel itself–which players might get more accustomed to, but would never go away entirely. I would guess that at least for the top players, the sort of effects you talk about would hit their teams more than the players themselves.
Jeff,
This suggests further inquiry into ways to quantify the depth of the game today relative to the past. 2013 upsets of top players who can’t be deemed of questionable greatness (Nadal, Federer, Murray, Serena, Stosur, Maria) suggests this depth.
There’s no question that it is deeper.
I also believe that play has improved at all levels of the game, which makes the current depth even more impressive, perhaps.
But without analysis, it is all just speculation.
I agree that it’s deeper, and that the level of play has increased.
On the other hand, it’s something that is devilishly difficult to quantify. Using Federer as an example: Is the game deeper because three nobodies beat him, or did he have a really bad run (or is he injured, or is he fading fast into oblivion) because three nobodies beat him? If Duval rockets into the top 50 in the next year, will her upset of Stosur be a reflection of the depth in the game, or a reflection of a top-50 player who hadn’t played enough pro matches yet?