WOMEN’S SINGLES MATCH NOTESSaturday 31 July 2021Gold Medal Match

TOKYO 2020 OLYMPIC TENNIS EVENT WOMEN’S SINGLES MATCH NOTES Saturday 31 July 2021 Gold Medal Match No. 9 Belinda Bencic (SUI) v Marketa Vondrousova (CZE) Bronze Medal Match No. 4 Elina Svitolina (UKR) v No. 15 Elena Rybakina (KAZ) On court today… • In the first of 2 gold medal match-ups between Switzerland and Czech Republic at the Olympic Tennis Event, Belinda Bencic will battle Marketa Vondrousova for women’s singles gold today. Bencic will become the first Swiss woman to win a gold medal in tennis should she triumph today – and she will hope to make it a double success when she and Viktorija Golubic face Czech No. 1 seeds Barbora Krejcikova/Katerina Siniakova in the women’s doubles gold medal match on Sunday. Should she win both matches, she will become the 4th woman in history to win singles and doubles at the same Olympic Tennis Event. For Vondrousova, victory today would see her win Czech Republic’s first gold medal at the Olympic Tennis Event since the Czechs have competed as an independent nation (from Atlanta 1996 onwards). • Elina Svitolina and Elena Rybakina must put the disappointment of semifinal defeats behind them as both will bid for a piece of Olympic history for their nations in the bronze medal match today. Neither Ukraine nor Kazakhstan have ever won a medal at the Olympic Tennis Event before – meaning that the winner of today’s clash will see her nation become the 28th country to win an Olympic medal in tennis since 1988 (or 29th if New Zealand win a bronze medal in men’s doubles on Friday). Svitolina is the higher-ranked of the pair – but they have split their 2 previous meetings, with Rybakina winning their most-recent match-up, on grass at Eastbourne last month.