Somdev in Quarters at VanOpen
Friday, August 01 2008 by Tim
Somdev Devvarman has advanced to the quarterfinals of the Vancouver Open – part of the ATP Challenger Series. This time he had a little help from his opponent.
After defeating Cecil Mamiit in a tight first round 6-4, 2-6, 7-6 (4), Somdev had the unfortunate draw of playing the #1 seed in the entire tournament. In an interesting twist #1 seed (and ranked #72 in the world) Yen-Hsun Lu retired – apparently without playing – moving the former Cavalier into the quarterfinals automatically. It seems that Lu somehow injured his thigh while preparing for the match.
The two-time NCAA singles champion now has a much friendlier draw for the quarters, playing the winner of 6-seed Go Soeda and qualifier Kyu Tae Im. The fortunate part is that the match between those two players occurs at 11am PDT today, and the match with Somdev will be just 5 hours later. The timing could certainly benefit the well-trained Wahoo in this situation.
There are various counts going on for what Somdev has accomplished recently. I don’t have the exact tallies but if he continues his run through this Challenger event, I may just have to look them up officially. He has won something like 50 straight matches, including his last 20 as a Cavalier and his first 30 as a professional. He’s also currently trying to win his fifth consecutive pro tournament. I have no idea what sort of records exist out there (I somehow doubt he’s close yet) but this is nonetheless a very impressive run for a very impressive former Cavalier.
More info to come this weekend as the event wraps up.
2 comment(s) and 1 trackback(s)
Some of the articles around the net made it appear like it was possible that he had been doing extra practice to prepare for Somdev and that's how he hurt his thigh.
However, most of those seemed to be terrible translations from Chinese that could have meant something totally different (more along the lines of "since they had the day off").
Regardless, nice to see Somdev moving on.
It had to end sometime. Somdev’s impressive streak of consecutive wins finally came to an end today as he lost to the 6-seed and 124th ranked Go Soeda of Japan in straight sets 6-4, 7-6. Even with the loss, he still picks up 16 points and several thousand
Clearly, Yen-Hsun Lu retired cuz he knew he was about to get his butt kicked.
So he "hurt his thigh".