NEW YORK, Sept 7 \u2014 Doubts over Elena Rybakina’s fitness lingered until the eve of \u200bthe U.S. Open and the Kazakh said she was amazed by her progress from an ankle injury after reaching the quarter-finals on Monday \u200cto edge closer to the world number one ranking.<\/p>\n
The second seed arrived in New York without having \u2060played since retiring from her Cincinnati \u200bOpen quarter-final against Iga Swiatek last \u2060month but has pieced together a superb run to storm into the \u200clast eight without dropping \u200ca set.<\/p>\n
She took apart two-times winner Naomi Osaka in the fourth \u2060round to set up a meeting with \u2060Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen, and another victory will help her leapfrog Aryna Sabalenka and secure top spot in the rankings next week.<\/p>\n
“My preparation wasn’t that great. I didn’t play for seven days and I couldn’t do much in the gym movement-wise, so we had to really go day by \u200cday,” Rybakina told reporters.<\/p>\n
“It’s amazing progress. I’m really \u200bglad how everything worked out. We didn’t even know if I’m going to be able to play or not. I have a great team. Also, a good doctor on the phone all the time.<\/p>\n
“I can’t say that all the matches were amazing, but today it was one of the best matches I played.”<\/p>\n
Rybakina had never previously reached the quarter-finals of the U.S. \u200bOpen and she said her latest run had improved her relationship with the tournament \u200cand New York.<\/p>\n
“Well, \u200cnow it’s \u2060getting better and better,” she added.<\/p>\n
“I usually don’t perform that well. Now I feel like this year it’s the best for now out of all the years that I’ve played here.<\/p>\n
“I like New York and it’s an amazing city. For me, \u200cmaybe just for two, \u200bthree weeks, because afterwards it might be too \u200cmuch. I really love \u2060the crowd \u200bhere.<\/p>\n
“I enjoy playing in stadiums like this.”<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Shrivathsa Sridhar in New York; Editing by \u200bPeter Rutherford)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK, Sept 7 \u2014 Doubts over Elena Rybakina’s fitness lingered until the eve of \u200bthe U.S. Open…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2879,2878,2881,1796,2880,53,54,2883,2884,50,2882,28,2877,2885,2369],"class_list":["post-68689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-homes","tag-international","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-news","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-tennis","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}