Julia Görges (Bad Oldesloe) has won the tournament in Moscow and thus completed her six-and-a-half year long dry spell on the WTA tour. The 28-year-old defeated Daria Kasatkina, a Russian local heroine, in the final match after just 68 minutes 6-1,6-2.
With her third victory in the tournament, Görges replaces the former industry leader Angelique Kerber as Germany’s number one in the tennis world rankings.
Görges, who lost this year’s finals of Mallorca, Bucharest and Washington and won her second and last tournament in Stuttgart in April 2011, will collect a cheque of 147,500 dollars (approximately 125,000 euros). Norddeutsche had its premiere success in Bad Gastein/Austria in 2010.
Görges started like the fire brigade, no sign of nervousness. In the first round, the world rankings-27. with a powerful and almost flawless game, her opponent, who was placed in a bad position, will not come into play. Görges only scored eleven points in the entire set and scored the round after 25 minutes.
In the second set, too, her opponent, who had celebrated her first tournament win in Charleston in the spring, did not rebel much. The young Russian had to accept that her opponent could not be defeated on this day. After Görges had finished the triumph with an ace, the tears of joy rolled over her cheeks.
Görges, who had meanwhile slipped out of the top 100, returns for the first time since the 18th century. In February 2013, she was once again among the top 20 players in the world. The two-time Grand Slam winner Kerber, who was still number one at the beginning of the year, loses her points from the WTA final 2016 in the new ranking on Monday and falls out of the top 20 again after five and a half years.
With her first tournament victory since Stuttgart in 2011, Görges is allowed to postpone her planned vacation by one week. The best German female tennis player of the season has qualified for the WTA Elite Trophy in Zhuhai. In the annual world rankings, Görges makes a leap from 28th to 18th place, and Angelique Kerber is now 19th in the Porsche Race to Singapore after finishing behind the electoral Regensburg rider.
Carina Witthöft will also reach for victory on Saturday. The 22-year-old from Hamburg will contest her first final on the WTA Tour in Luxembourg, opponent of the world rankings 73. is Olympic champion Monica Puig from Puerto Rico.