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Ana Ivanovic wins French Open title
Zeenews Bureau
Paris, June 07: Serbia’s Ana Ivanovic won her maiden grand slam title on Saturday as she beat Dinara Safina 6-4, 6-3 in the final of the French Open women’s singles event. By entering the final earlier, Ivanovic had already ensured her elevation to the number one spot in the women’s ranking, overtaking Maria Sharapova.
Russian 13th seed Safina saw her hopes of joining big brother Marat as a Grand Slam champion dashed at the hands of Ivanovic.
For the second seeded pin-up, it was third time lucky after she had lost both her previous major finals - to Justine Henin here 12 months ago and Maria Sharapova at the Australian Open in January.
Safina had reached her first Grand Slam final in dramatic fashion putting out top seed Sharapova and seventh seed Elena Dementieva in earlier rounds.
In both ties, the 22-year-old Safina had been a set and 2-5 down before carving out memorable wins, saving a match point in each.
The Russian, who had spent two more hours than Ivanovic getting to the title match, endured a nerve-wracking start to the final being broken twice to quickly slip 1-4 down before fighting back to 4-4 with two breaks of her own.
A year ago, Ivanovic suffered numbing stagefright on her Grand Slam final debut winning just three games against four-time winner Henin.
With the recently-retired world number one now looking on from the VIP enclosure on Court Philippe Chatrier, Ivanovic stopped the rot to break back to lead 5-4.
The 20-year-old wasted a first set point but wrapped up the opener after 45 minutes when Safina, pinned behind the baseline, slapped a backhand high and long.
Ivanovic, finding depth and power with her confident, accurate groundstrokes, broke a lacklustre Safina again to take a 2-1 lead in the second set which became 3-1 thanks to a love service game.
She held another shaky service to lead 4-2 while Safina overcame her fourth and fifth double faults of the match to hold in the seventh game.
But the battling Russian finally ran out of steam in the ninth game when she handed her opponent three match points with the title gratefully gobbled up when an Ivanovic return died at her feet.
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