Defending champion Venus Williams breezed into the third round at Wimbledon despite playing with a heavily-bandaged knee in her 6-3, 6-2 victory over Kateryna Bondarenko on Thursday.
Williams, the third seed, arrived on Court One with her left knee in a substantial strapping, but it didn’t cause the American any major problems as she kept alive her bid to become the first woman to win a hat-trick of Wimbledon singles’ titles since Steffi Graf claimed three in a row from 1991 to 1993.
Venus faces Spanish world number 34 Carla Suarez Navarro next but the sterner tests that lie in wait in the second week could put the former world number one under more pressure if the injury lingers.
”Everything was working for me. I’m on a great run here and I just want to keep it going,” Williams said.
In the 12 months since she was crowned champion at the All England Club for the fifth time, after brushing aside sister Serena in the final, Venus has produced some underwhelming performances on the WTA Tour.
But she has litte to worry about now she is back on grass. Since winning Wimbledon for the first time in 2000, the 29-year-old has reached six of the following eight finals, with four more victories to her credit.
She demolished Stefanie Voegele in the first round and was in equally imperious mood against Bondarenko, a Ukrainian ranked 73rd in the world.
Despite winning the junior Wimbledon singles title in 2004, Bondarenko had never got past the second round of the main event here in four attempts.
While Venus’ sister Serena revealed on Wednesday that she has been trying to write a television script, there were few cliffhanger moments on Court 1 as the champion extended her three-year unbeaten run on the grass courts of south-west London.
Bondarenko tried to keep Williams on the move as much as possible to test the impact of the injury and was rewarded with several Venus miscues early on.
But the champion’s overwhelming power game will always earn cheap points against inferior opponents. Without hitting top gear, Venus was able to wrestle control of the set when she broke for a 3-2 lead.
Gradually Venus began to unload more of the fierce ground-strokes that make her such a tough proposition on grass. The American’s decibel level rose as a defiant grunt accompanied each booming winner and another break soon clinched the first set.
The sheer intensity of Venus’s game was too much for Bondarenko.
Battered into submission, she was finally put out of her misery when Venus broke to go 4-2 ahead in the second set and sealed victory thanks for more unforced errors from her bewildered opponent. — AFP
