The Athlete of the Week –Tennis Player Simona Halep

Tennis is the sports discipline that early in 2015 brought Romania the first praiseworthy individual performance, since Simona Halep won the WTA tournament in Shenzhen, China.

România Internațional, 13.01.2015, 14:00

Tennis is the sports discipline that early in 2015 brought Romania the first praiseworthy individual performance, since Simona Halep won the WTA tournament in Shenzhen, China, securing a straight-sets win in the final against her Swiss challenger Timea Bacsinsky, 6-2, 6-2. The Romanian ranked as the main favorite to winning the tournament.

Halep’s excellent run in Shenzhen included a first-round win against Germany’s Anita Beck, who was the only tennis player to whom Halep conceded victory in one single set. Then the Romanian had no problem outclassing Russia’s Natalya Vihliantseva, Aleksandra Krunic of Serbia and Saisai Zheng of China, with no set conceded this time. For her excellent run in the Shenzhen tournament, Radio Romania International has designated Simona Halep the Athlete of the Week.

Simona Halep was born on September 27, 1991 in Constanta, southeastern Romania. She made her debut as a professional in 2006, when she played her first ITF circuit games. In 2010, Halep won a place among the world’s top 100 tennis players. The progress she made was amazing, since in 2013 Halep‘s record included 53 wins and 17 defeats; back then the Romanian won six WTA tournaments, the ones in Nürnberg, s-Hertogenbosch, Budapest, New Haven, Moscow and Sofia. In 2014, Simona Halep won the Doha and Bucharest tournaments, also playing in the finals of the Roland Garros and Madrid tournaments. In August 2014, Halep was 2nd-seeded in the world rankings, the highest position ever for a Romanian lady tennis player. End-of-the-year WTA rankings saw Help being the 3-rd seed.

This week the Romanian tennis player was supposed to be playing in the Sydney tournament, a Grand Slam event with 731 thousand dollars prize money up for grabs, but on Tuesday Simona Halep withdrew from competition because of a gastroenteritis whose signs she had already felt while playing in China. The Romanian tennis player is now in a recovery period, as she needs to gather strength for the Australian Open, scheduled to kick off in Melbourne next week.