AO Day 9 - Victoria Azarenka ten years later
The Tennis Podcast
David Law
4.5 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 24 January 2023
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It wasn't a vintage day at the Australian Open with three straight sets matches and one retirement, but there was a vintage performance by Victoria Azarenka as she beat Jessica Pegula 6-4 6-1 to reach the semi-finals in Melbourne for the first time since her title run in 2013. Catherine, David and Matt talk all about that, as well as her extraordinary press conference in which she opened up about the fears and anxiety she experienced last year. There's also our take on what went wrong for Jessica Pegula and where it leaves her, and another fearsome display by Elena Rybakina. Is she now the favourite for the title? On the men's side, there's chat about the scintillating form of Stefanos Tsitsipas and how Karen Khachanov has quietly turned himself into a Grand Slam specialist.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Billie Jean King. This is Mary and Bartoli. I'm Matt Vellander. This is Mary Carillo. |
| 0:05.3 | This is Pam Shriver. This is Yannick Noah and you're listening to the tennis podcast. |
| 0:20.6 | Well welcome once again to tennis podcast towers Melvin where you find myself Matt and David |
| 0:27.2 | at 11.53pm and our first two semifinals at this Australian Open have been set. It'll be Victoria |
| 0:37.8 | Azarenka, the two-time former champion against Elena Rabakina and it'll be Karen Hashanov |
| 0:43.5 | up against Stefano Sitsapas who we have just watched pledged to build schools for children |
| 0:50.8 | in the first world country of Australia. Not a direction I expected the evening to go but there we are. |
| 0:59.2 | Good on you Stefano Sitsapas. Yeah, I mean it's definitely a nice thought. He's definitely seen |
| 1:05.2 | a slogan somewhere that Victoria is the state of education and he was saying some stuff to Jim |
| 1:13.9 | Carillo just now on the court after his win over Yiri Le Hetchka. It's been a day of straight |
| 1:19.9 | set victories. Yeah, well and and a retirement. We didn't even quite get four straight sets victories. |
| 1:30.1 | The very first retirement of the tournament and if you're interested in that fact more on it |
| 1:37.8 | in the newsletter. Oh, I'm looking forward to the newsletter now. Because an extension of |
| 1:43.8 | of that stat is featured in today's newsletter and Matt did did a lot of pursuing of the story |
| 1:53.0 | for this stat. Yes, I really love it when something slightly weird happens during a day because |
| 1:59.2 | that's always inspiration for a stat. The hardest thing about the stat is thinking of the idea |
| 2:05.1 | but yesterday we had or was it two days ago almost triple bagels and today we had resigned. Matt almost |
| 2:11.8 | lost his mind on that day. I'm bad at my own mind. If you consider we I think we've produced |
| 2:19.8 | in the last 12 months around a hundred or so newsletters. That's a lot of stats because there's a |
| 2:26.4 | stat in every one. Yeah and the stat about this being the first retirement of the tournament is |
| 2:32.1 | that's doing around people. People know that people are tweeting it but Matt's got |
| 2:36.8 | Matt's got more layers. Now we're talking. Are the reasons to subscribe to the newsletter include |
... |
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