Travel to Shanghai

The tournament in Paris will name all participants in the final championship

The last tennis tournament of the Masters series with a prize fund of 2.1 million euros is taking place in the French capital. At the end of these competitions, the full list of participants in the final men's tournament in Shanghai, which will take place in November, will be determined. At the moment, the names of six holders of Shanghai “tickets” are known. These are the players who occupy the top six positions in the ATP rankings: Roger Federer (Switzerland), Rafal Nadal (Spain), Novak Djokovic (Serbia), Nikolay Davydenko (Russia), Andy Roddick (USA) and David Ferrer (Spain). Several tennis players competed for the remaining two places last night - Fernando Gonzalez (Chile), Tommy Haas (Germany), Tommy Robredo (Spain), James Blake (USA) and Russian Mikhail Youzhny.

In the championship race, ATP Yuzhny, who is in 17th place with 296 points, shared 10 positions and 84 points with Gonzalez. The difference with Tommy Haas, who is behind Gonzalez, is 33 points for the South. To be guaranteed to get to the tournament in Shanghai, the Russian needs to win in Paris, which will bring him 100 points. However, in the presence of the first racket of the world, Roger Federer, such a situation can only be virtual. To “catch up” with Haas, Youzhny will only need to reach the semifinals, which will give him 45 points. If the Russian reaches the final, he will add another 70 points to his existing 296 points.

In any case, every match of Yuzhny in Paris is of fundamental nature. The Muscovite announced the importance of this tournament a few weeks earlier at the Kremlin Cup. “I won’t hide the fact that the results of the tournaments in Moscow and St. Petersburg are not as important to me as the next two, especially in Paris,” said the tennis player.

In his opening match in Paris, Youzhny prevailed over the host Arnaud Clement - 6:4, 6:3. However, after that he had a difficult match with the Chilean, to whom the Russian had lost three times before. But yesterday he broke the clean sheet by defeating the Chilean - 3:6, 6:3, 6:3. The Russian's next opponent will be the German Haas.

Meanwhile, the tournament in the French capital began with a scandal. The director of the French Tennis Federation, Jean-François Vilot, openly stated that if the game of one of the tennis players seems suspicious, if a large amount is bet on the match, and it follows an “implausible” scenario, then all information will be transferred to the police so that for law enforcement officials to begin an investigation. Recently, the topic of match fixing in tennis has almost come to the fore. This summer, the Russian Nikolai Davydenko was in the spotlight because he refused to finish the match with the little-known Argentinean. Added to this was an incident at a recent tournament in the city on the Neva, where the judge complained to the same Davydenko that he was allegedly not very active on the court. After this, other players started talking about match-fixing. True, the comments were mainly made by those who were missing stars from heaven. The same Federer, when asked such a question, replied that he knew nothing about such a phenomenon as match-fixing in tennis.

Olga ERMOLINA