The Athlete of the Week: Tennis Player Irina Begu

Irina Begu last week won the ITF tournament in Campinas

Steliu Lambru, 11.03.2014, 13:29

Romanian tennis player Irina Begu last week won the ITF tournament in Campinas, Brazil, with 25,000 dollars prize money up for grabs. In the finals, Begu snatched a straight-sets win against Russian Alexandra Panova, 6-2,6-4. 23-year old Begu is a 127-seed in the women’s rankings, while Panova is seeded 25, and 149 in the WTA rankings. This week Begu is competing in the Sao Paolo tournament, where she is seeded first, as another Romanian, Alexandra Dulgheru, withdrew from competition. In the women’s doubles, Irina Begu and Alexandra Panova, the one she had defeated in Campinas, rank as the main favorites and have secured their ticket to the Sao Paolo tournament’s quarterfinals, with no game for them to be played, since Hilda Melander and Rebecca Peterson from Sweden withdrew from competition.

Irina Begu was born in Bucharest on August 26, 1990. The first notable performance of her career occurred in 2006, when Begu won the European title in the women’s under-16 category. Then the Romanian climbed up to the upper echelon of the world rankings, year after year, while in 2011 she held the best position of her career in the women’s singles, as she was a WTA 38-seed.

Then the time came for the Romanian to compel recognition in the women’s doubles, since she reached as far as the finals in a string of WTA tournaments. Jointly with Monica Niculescu, Begu won the tournament in Hobart, Australia, in 2012, while in 2013 she won the ‘s-Hertogenbosch tournament in the Netherlands, pairing up with Anabel Medina Garrigues from Spain. Irina Begu is a WTA 127-seed in the singles at the moment, skipping 18 positions. Contributing to her good run was the fact that, apart from her performance in the Rio de Janeiro tournament doubles, Begu succeeded in reaching as far as the quarterfinals in the women’s singles. At present, Irina is a WTA 66-seed in the doubles competition.