Latvian tennis player Jelena Ostapenko won the WTA 250 Rothesay Birmingham Classic tournament with a prize pool of 259,303 USD, prevailing in the final over Barbora Krejcikova (Czech Republic) by 2-0 (7:6, 6:4) in 1:53 hours.
The first set was very contested, with each competitor winning her serve. It came down to a tiebreak in which Jelena Ostapenko, a 2018 Wimbledon semi-finalist, showed stronger nerves, saving one set point from the Czech player and on her fourth chance won the set. The first set lasted exactly an hour.
In the second set, Jelena Ostapenko led convincingly with 5:1 after two breaks in the first and fifth games. Barbora Krejcikova, however, returned one of the breaks to reach 4:5 and even led with 30:15 on her rival’s serve, but the Latvian managed to assert herself, thus winning the match.
This was the sixth title in the career of Jelena Ostapenko.
Jelena Ostapenko has career-high WTA rankings of world No 5 in singles, achieved on March 19, 2018. She won the 2017 French Open singles title, becoming the first player from Latvia to win a Grand Slam singles tournament and the first unseeded player to win the French Open since 1933. In addition to her singles career, she has played as a member of the Latvia Fed Cup team.
