New York: Blame it on the hair.
Caroline Wozniacki got her blonde braid caught in her racket while hitting a forehand in her second-round US Open match on Wednesday against Aliaksandra Sasnovich, and she gamely tried to hit a backhand on the next shot, with her hair still entangled.
“I almost took my head off,” Wozniakci told reporters later. “It was really tangled up good, so I didn’t have a chance.”
Wozniacki lost the point, but she didn’t lose her sense of humour. Once she got her hair and her racket separated, she had no choice but to laugh at herself.
The 24-year-old Dane, seeded 10th, went on to win 6-3, 6-4, and she later tweeted a clip of the entanglement to her 675,000 followers. Wozniacki explained that such snags used to happen all the time before she started braiding her hair, but this was the first post-braid incident.
“It’s one of those things,” she said. “Us women, we keep it interesting.”
As Croatia’s Ivan Dodig knows all too well after his 2014 Grand Slam season, you can’t win if you can’t finish.
At the Australian Open in January, he stopped playing in the fourth set of his second-round match, citing cramps.
At the French Open in May — shortly after he said he injured his ribs at a tournament in Rome — Dodig lasted all of four games before quitting in the first round.
And at the US Open on Wednesday, at 1-all in the fifth set against 19th-seeded Feliciano Lopez, the 53rd-ranked Dodig stopped yet again, again officially citing cramps.
“Suddenly, in one moment, I was running for one ball and I [felt] a bit tight on the right hip. And after a couple of games, I started feeling like more cramps in the right leg,” Dodig said.
“Basically, I decided [it would be] best if I stop the match and not risk [being healthy] for the next tournaments,” he added.
Hey, at least he showed up in Melbourne, Paris and New York. At the year’s other Grand Slam tournament, Wimbledon in June, Dodig withdrew from the field before play began.
