After a three-year hiatus due to COVID-19, the Odlum Brown VanOpen returned home to Hollyburn Country Club in beautiful West Vancouver this August 13–21. The week could not have been better for tennis. Vancouver welcomed the event with beautiful clear skies, giving both fans and players a gorgeous view of English Bay between matches. Local food and drink vendors offered tastings throughout the week-long summer event, making it one of the best ways to spend August days in Vancouver.
While the tournament is typically smaller in comparison to the Grand Slam Opens, like the Rogers Cup and the US Open, this year the Odlum Brown was given the distinct pleasure of being a full WTA Tournament as part of the WTA 125 tour, and a returning fan favourite, the ATP Challenger Tour. These tournaments are the second highest level of competition for the men’s and women’s tennis leagues and give upcoming tennis stars in the lower rankings a chance to showcase their talent and earn some money.
A special trio of matches graced tennis fans at Odlum Brown this year: Canada’s Eugenie “Genie” Bouchard played her first professional tennis match on August 14, after a 17-month recovery from right shoulder surgery. Bouchard’s first match was a doubles match alongside Kayla Cross from London, Ontario. Bouchard and Cross faced off against two Italian talents, Lucia Bronzetti and Elisabetta Cocciaretto, and defeated them, but unfortunately lost on August 19 against the strong doubles duo of USA’s Asia Muhammed and Japan’s Miyu Kato. Bouchard lost her draw match on August 16 in two sets, both 2-6, against the Netherlands’ Arianne Hartono.
Saturday, August 20 saw the men’s and women’s doubles finals play out. The powerhouse duo of Kato and Muhammed won the women’s doubles final over Hungary’s Timea Babos and the US’s Angela Kulikov, 6-3 and 7-5. The match was thrilling to watch, with a back-and-forth second set that saw both pairs taking turns in the lead before Muhammed and Kato rallied back to win. This year’s win marked both Muhammed’s and Kato’s second doubles titles at Odlum Brown. Muhammed won back in 2014, and Kato has back-to-back doubles titles, winning in 2019.
Japan’s Ben McLachlan and Sweden’s Andre Goransson won a fantastic and dramatic men’s doubles final over Philippines’ Treat Huey and Australia’s John-Patrick Smith. It was a nail-biter back-and-forth match that saw no clear winner until the third and final set, ending 11 games to 9 for McLachlan and Goransson. Vancouver marked a back-to-back doubles win as a duo for McLachlan and Goransson, having won the Chicago Challenger doubles a week prior.
Sunday, August 21 was the final day of the tournament and saw the finals for the men’s and women’s singles. The WTA 125 singles were won by Valentini Grammatikopoulou of Greece in a 6-2, 6-4 over the second seed player Lucia Bronzetti. Bronzetti was the second seed and one of the favourites to win the title. She had a dominant performance all tournament long, only going into extra sets once. But it was Grammatikopoulou who battled all the way through qualifying, won the final, and made history at the VanOpen for being the first woman to battle her way through qualifying and win the finals and her first WTA title. Relaxed and poised, Grammatikopoulou only dropped one set throughout the entire tournament. Falling behind in the first set and dropping 2 games to 0, Grammatikopoulou came back with aggressive tactics and came to win 6 straight games and take the first set, and repeated her performance in the second to win.
Frenchman Constant Lestienne won the men’s ATP Challenger single title in three games 6-0, 4-6, 6-3 over fellow countryman Arthur Rinderknech. Lestienne has been on a roll this summer, winning 19 out of 21 of his latest matches. Vancouver marked the Frenchman’s third ATP Challenger win and title in the last two months, winning the Malaga Open in Spain in June and Pozoblanco in July.
Teryn Midzain is an English Major with ambitious goals to write movies and a full-time nerd, whose personality and eccentrics run on high-octane like the cars he loves. More importantly, Teryn loves sports [Formula One], and doesn’t care who knows. When not creating and running deadly schemes in his D&D sessions, Teryn tries to reach the core of what makes the romantic and dramatic World of Sports, the characters and people that make the events so spectacular.
