TENNIS - AUSTRALIAN OPEN

The Australian Open is a tennis tournament where players come from across the globe to compete The Australian Open was founded in 1905, however at the time this was only for men, 17 years later women would be able to take part in this competition Today the tournament is home to men’s, women’s, doubles and wheelchair tennis The Australian Open is one of the four competitions in the tennis world that make up the Grand Slam. The other three tennis competitions are the French Open, the US Open and Wimbledon. This year The Australian Open was played during 16th – 29th January which is the first major tournament of the year. Before 1969 the competition was called the Australian Men’s Championship. Until 1988 the competition had four major sites, which included, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide Nowadays, the competition has one site in Melbourne, where it is called Melbourne Park; before this it was called Flinders Park. The court at Melbourne Park is a hard court, which means that Wimbledon is the only grass court in the Grand Slam series The tennis tournament was not held during the First or Second World Wars.

There are some interesting facts about this tournament, for example in 2003 Andre Agassi from the US was the first person to win this competition four times. The most singles titles won is ten, by Novak Djokovic; he was also the winner this year

Closer to home, the British player Andy Murray crashed out of the competition in round 3 to Spain’s Roberto Bautista-Agut. This was the same round that Cameron Norrie suffered a third-round defeat in this year’s tournament. Emma Raducanu lost her position in the competition when she lost in round 2 to Coco Gauff from the US. Meanwhile, Britain’s Alfie Hewett and Gordon Reid won the Wheelchair doubles. Alfie Hewett, who was seeded number 1, as he also clinched his first solo victory.