Donna Vekic swept local favorite Emma Raducanu 6-0, 7-6 (6) to become the first lucky loser to ever win a WTA 500-level title at the HSBC Championships on Sunday in London.
The 29-year-old Croatian won her fifth career singles title — her first at the 500 level — with a dominant opening set and a resilient second set. Vekic was broken twice in the second, falling into a 5-2 hole before winning four straight games. She then survived blowing a 4-1 lead in the tiebreaker to complete the sweep.
Vekic, whose last title came at the 2023 Monterrey Open, lost in the second round of qualifying. She’s the sixth loser to win a WTA event, the first since 2023. She overcame a 64% first-serve percentage and winning just 35% of her second serves by winning 49% of her return points and converting 5 of 11 break-point chances.
Raducanu, a London native from Bromley, came up just short of winning her first title since the 2021 US Open.
Libema Open
American Robin Montgomery won her first career WTA title in anticlimactic fashion after Czech competitor Barbora Krejcikova withdrew from the final due to illness at ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands.
Montgomery, a 21-year-old Washington, D.C. native, largely dominated her run to the final in a field laden with upsets. After dropping the opening set of her opening match, she won her final eight sets of the event, sweeping Greet Minnen, Daria Snigur and Ajla Tomljanovic.
The eighth-seeded Krejcikova, the only seed to make the quarterfinals, was kept without a title since her 2024 Wimbledon title due to the withdrawal.
–Field Level Media
