Citi Open: Emma Raducanu overcomes Camila Osorio in longest two-set match this year
- Raducanu, the British player who won the title at Flushing Meadows as a qualifier a year ago is finding her feet on US soil yet again
- Conditions in Washington were gruelling, with both players needing medical timeouts for blisters
Reigning US Open champion Emma Raducanu found herself completely exhausted, physically and mentally, after playing a pair of tiebreakers across nearly three hours on a hot and humid afternoon at the Citi Open on Thursday.
“Everything,” the second-seeded Raducanu said afterward, “was tired.”
Still, she managed to reach her second quarter final of the season by edging Camila Osorio 7-6 (5), 7-6 (4) with the temperature in the 30 degrees, getting done just before a thunderstorm hit the area, suspending play in other matches at the hard-court tournament.
“It’s flooding pretty bad,” Raducanu said during her post-match news conference. “You could probably find a mermaid or something.”
She dealt with blisters on her racket-wielding right hand and took a medical timeout late in the second set. Osorio was visited by a trainer earlier.
“A pretty monumental effort to really get through that,” Raducanu said. “I’m just really pleased and proud of how I dug in when … it mattered.”
Her only other quarter final appearance in a dozen tournaments in 2022 came back in April on red clay at Stuttgart, Germany, where she lost at that stage to No 1-ranked Iga Swiatek. This time, Raducanu will face 60th-ranked Liudmila Samsonova for a berth in the semi-finals at the tune-up for the US Open, which begins on August 29.
