Italian translation at settesei.it
Belinda Bencic is back among the WTA elites. Last week in Dubai, she won her first Premier-level title since 2015, knocking out four top-ten players in the process. They were hardly dominant victories, with all four going to deciding sets and two of the four culminating in final-set tiebreaks, but there is no question that the 21-year-old Swiss is once again a threat at the tour’s biggest events.
Her string of top-ten victories leaves us to wonder how her title stacks up against similar feats in the past. Most relevant is the path Bencic took to her last Premier title, the 2015 Canadian Open. Four years ago in Toronto, she defeated four members of the top six, including then-top-ranked Serena Williams in the semi-final and Simona Halep in the championship match. Even the two lower-ranked opponents she faced that week were dangerous players then ranked in the top 25, Eugenie Bouchard and Sabine Lisicki. Those two presented more serious challenges than Bencic’s first two matches last week against Lucie Hradecka and Stefanie Voegele.
Spoiler alert: Toronto was the tougher path. It wasn’t the most difficult of all time, but it’s in the conversation. Bencic’s Dubai title surely wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t quite as unusual as last weekend’s press made it out to be.
Quantifying path difficulty
This is something we’ve done before. I’ve written several articles comparing the quality of opposition faced in slams, particularly as it applies to the ATP’s big three. It’s more complicated to compare all WTA events, in part because there are so many different levels of tournament, and the categorizations have changed over the years. But we can wave some of that aside for today’s purposes.
Here’s the simple algorithm to measure the difficulty of a player’s path to a title:
- Pick a standard Elo rating for the type of tournament won. (In this case, we’re using 1900 for hard-court wins. We’d use lower numbers for clay and grass, but it gets complicated, and it’s more practical for today’s purposes to focus solely on hard-court events.)
- Find the surface-weighted Elos of each opponent she played in the tournament
- For each opponent, calculate the odds using the standard Elo rating and the opponent’s Elo rating.
- Calculate the difficulty for each match as one minus the odds in the previous step.
- Sum the single-match difficulties.
In the grand slam exercises I’ve done in the past, I’ve taken a final step of normalizing the results so that an average major title is exactly 1.0. Here, the idea of ‘average’ is more nebulous, so we’ll leave our results un-normalized.
The average difficulty of a hard-court title (excluding majors and year-end championships) is about 1.8. Bencic’s 2015 Toronto run was 3.64, and her path last week was 3.01.
It’s hotter in Miami (and Indian Wells)
One of the variables that influences path difficulty is number of matches. Bencic played six last week (as she did at the 2015 Canadian Open), but the top eight seeds played only five. At Indian Wells and Miami, the top 32 seeds play up to six matches, but those might be expected to present more challenges than Bencic’s six in Dubai, since the round-of-64 opponent has already won a match.
Certainly it has turned out that way. Here are the top ten most difficult hard-court WTA title paths since 2000:
Year Event Winner Matches Difficulty 2010 Miami Kim Clijsters 6 3.80 2011 Miami Victoria Azarenka 6 3.78 2007 Miami Serena Williams 6 3.65 2015 Canadian Open Belinda Bencic 6 3.64 2012 Indian Wells Victoria Azarenka 6 3.59 2018 Cincinnati Kiki Bertens 6 3.54 2000 Miami Martina Hingis 6 3.46 2002 Miami Serena Williams 6 3.45 2008 Miami Serena Williams 6 3.37 2013 Miami Serena Williams 6 3.35
Seven of the ten are from Miami, an event with a grand-slam-like field. Indian Wells is similar, but featured a weaker draw for most of the 21st century because Serena and Venus Williams chose not to play there. Bencic’s Toronto run is one of only two in the top ten outside of the March sunshine swing. The other is Kiki Bertens’s path to last year’s Cincinnati title, in which she also defeated Halep, Petra Kvitova, and Elina Svitolina, albeit not quite in the same order than Bencic did last week.
Also hot in Dubai
I calculated title difficulty for about 600 hard-court champions going back to 2000. Bencic’s Dubai path doesn’t register among the very most challenging, but it still stands above most of the pack. Here are the next 25 toughest routes, including every path rated a 3.0 or above:
Year Event Winner Matches Difficulty 2016 Wuhan Petra Kvitova 6 3.32 2000 Indian Wells Lindsay Davenport 6 3.32 2014 Beijing Maria Sharapova 6 3.30 2008 Olympics Elena Dementieva 6 3.27 2009 Indian Wells Vera Zvonareva 6 3.27 2007 Indian Wells Daniela Hantuchova 6 3.23 2002 Filderstadt Kim Clijsters 5 3.23 2013 Beijing Serena Williams 6 3.21 2018 Doha Petra Kvitova 6 3.18 2002 Los Angeles Chanda Rubin 5 3.18 2000 Los Angeles Serena Williams 5 3.16 2009 Miami Victoria Azarenka 6 3.15 2003 Miami Serena Williams 6 3.13 2002 Indian Wells Daniela Hantuchova 6 3.10 2018 Wuhan Aryna Sabalenka 6 3.08 2008 Indian Wells Ana Ivanovic 6 3.08 2012 Tokyo Nadia Petrova 6 3.08 2010 Sydney Elena Dementieva 5 3.06 2010 Indian Wells Jelena Jankovic 6 3.03 2000 Sydney Venus Williams 6 3.02 2000 Sydney Amelie Mauresmo 4 3.02 2019 Dubai Belinda Bencic 6 3.01 2009 Tokyo Maria Sharapova 6 3.00 2002 San Diego Venus Williams 5 3.00 2001 Sydney Martina Hingis 4 2.99
There’s Belinda again, at 32nd overall. Historically, the February tournaments in the Gulf haven’t been the toughest on the calendar, at least compared with Indian Wells, Miami, and Sydney. Yet Kvitova took an even more difficult path to the title last year in Doha. (Dubai and Doha trade tournament levels each year. As a Premier 5, Doha was worth more points in 2018; Dubai took over the status and was worth more points in 2019.) She also plowed through four top-ten opponents, and she needed to beat 33rd-ranked Agnieszka Radwanska just to earn a place in the round of 16.
Strong but weaker
Again, Bencic’s Dubai title was an impressive feat. But as we’ve seen, it pales in comparison with her previous Premier title. I suppose she might have won anyway if faced with more difficult competition, but that pair of third-set tiebreaks suggests she was pushed to the limit as it was.
While the current WTA field is extremely deep, packed with very good players, the lack of one historically great superstar (or more!) shows up in the Elo ratings. Of the 35 champions shown in the two tables above, 12 had to beat a player with a surface-weighted rating of 2240 or higher, and 12 more needed to get past an opponent rated 2100 or above. Bencic’s toughest task last week was Halep, at 2054. While it isn’t easy to knock off several consecutive foes in the 2000 range, it’s not the same as including one victory over a superstar like Serena, Venus, Maria Sharapova, or Victoria Azarenka at her peak.
At the 2015 Canadian Open, Bencic counted Serena among the vanquished. Maybe in another four years, when the Swiss is due for her next odds-defying Premier title, she’ll face down a couple of new young superstars and earn a place at the top of this list.