Thursday saw Paula Badosa stop Zhang Shuai’s fairytale run in front of a raucous home crowd to reach the China Open semi-finals, where she will meet Coco Gauff, who needed 3 sets to get past qualifier Yulia Starodubtseva.
Badosa, the No 15 seed from Spain, survived a stern second-set test from Zhang, the Chinese wild-card who has set the WTA 1000 event alight with her 4 match winning run to the quarter-finals that brought an end to her 24-match losing streak since June 2022. The Spaniard romped through the first set, but had to dig deep to come from 1-3 down in the second to win through, 6-1 7-6(4), in an hour and 23 minutes, and move into her 5th career semi-final at WTA 1000 level.
Badosa advances to her 3rd semi-final in her past 5 tournaments, and has now won 28 of her last 35 matches dating back to mid-May. The former World No 2 also made the Last 4 at Madrid 2021, Indian Wells 2022 and Cincinnati 2024.
After the one-sided opener, in which Badosa broke Zhang to love 3 times, the Chinese, buoyed by her home crowd, raised her game to go toe-to-toe with the Washington champion throughout the second set. Towards the end of the second set, Zhang’s aggressive tactics became more of a tightrope, and the 35-year-old’s hitting became more spectacular. In the tiebreak, she missed 2 crucial near-winners by mere inches, and Badosa proved the more solid player down the home stretch.
Crucially, the 15th seed kept her unforced error count down to 14, compared to Zhang’s 22, and, as a result, the Chinese’s drought-busting week came to a stuttering end.
Coco Gauff needed 3 sets to figure out how to stop qualifier Yuliia Starodubtseva from advancing, and has reached the Last 4 against Paula Badosa. Gauff advanced to the quarter-finals after 4-time major winner Naomi Osaka was forced to retire at a set all because of a lower back injury, and there she met stern resistance from Yulia Starodubsteva, a Ukrainian qualifier, in her opening set. Ranked 115, the 24-year-old had yet to lose a set in Beijing until Gauff stormed back to snag the second.
Gauff overcame her slow start to reel in the surging Ukrainian, who was playing her second WTA quarter-final in her WTA 1000 debut. Starodubtseva, who last month became the first woman in the Open Era to successfully qualify at all 4 Grand Slams in a single season, will make her Top 100 debut on Monday, while Gauff will face Badosa on Saturday for a spot in her first final since winning Auckland in January, and her first at the WTA 1000 level since winning Cincinnati last summer.
Meanwhile, British doubles No 1 Olivia Nicholls has continued her winning form at the China Open after she and her Czech partner Tereza Mihilakova reached the quarter-final of the WTA 1000 event. Nicholls & Mihilakova produced their best performance of the tournament so far, when they upset New Zealand’s Erin Routliffe & Gabriela Dabrowski from Canada, the top seeds, 7-6(5) 3-6 [11-9] in just under 2 hours. They will next face Taipei’s Chan Hao-ching & Veronika Kudermetova from Russia, the 7th seeds, for a spot in the semi-finals.
