I picked Venus Williams to reach the French Open final last week. But I didn’t pick her outfit. Had I known that she was going to outfit herself with a see-through can-can dress in advance, I would have picked her win! ADHEREL
Actually, I think the dress looks good. Not great. Just good. And I understand it’s the nude colored “underneath” that’s causing quite the stir.
“First of all, I try to represent what I think my personality is on the court,” Venus said about the dress. “That’s the first part of it. The second part is sometimes you just dream it up. Sometimes you can see a dress and say, Hey, I really like those slits, so let me put that in my tennis dress. Or I’m dying to do lace. How can we do that on the court and make it work? Sometimes it’s like, oh, here is the challenge. Sometimes it’s like, oh, suddenly a bright idea. It’s always different.”
Bright idea or not, Venus is playing very strong tennis this year. The 29-year-old hasn’t dropped a set in two matches and her draw looks manageable out to the finals.
And the dress seems to have deflected the pressures of Grand Slam tennis. After all, how often do tennis players talk openly about their bum?
“I mean, it all started in Australia with the slits, and it was about a I had a dress with really long slits in the front, and it was about wearing a dress that it looks like, oh, you have these slits with bareness,” Venus elaborated. “So it has really the design has nothing to do with the rear. It just so happens that I have a very well developed one. It’s all genetic. If you look at mom and dad, you’ll see the same thing happening. If you look at my sister, you’ll see the same thing. It’s genetic.”
What else is there to say? Is this what tennis has become on the WTA circuit?
As for the matches, Venus was tested a little but prevailed 6-2, 6-4 over Spain’s Arantxa Parra Santonja.
Venus will now play 2009 French Open semifinalist Dominika Cibulkova.
Defending champion Svetlana Kuznetsova needed to save a handful of match points in the second set to overcome Andrea Petkovic in three sets 4-6, 7-5, 6-4. Other winners on a rain-filled Wednesday were Maria Kirilenko (Kuznetsova’s next opponent), Flavia Pennetta, Caroline Wozniacki and the darling of the French, Aravane Rezai who came through in the clutch with a 6-2, 2-6, 6-3 win over Angelique Kerber.
Rezai, who’s among the threats to go deep in Paris, had some choice words for her French No. 1 countrywoman Marion Bartoli.
“Marion is a difficult girl. She already attacked me two years ago when I reached the final in Istanbul,” said Rezai Wednesday. “If she has a problem with me, I don’t know, because I did nothing. That’s a bit of a shame, but that’s her education. She has attacked me many times in the press. I don’t have the same education as the one she has.”
More on that to come I’m sure. Bartoli plays tomorrow. As does Elena Dementieva who completes her rained-out match plus a full slate of top half matches including Serena Williams, Jelena Jankovic, Maria Sharapova and four-time winner Justine Henin.
For the men tomorrow it should be business as usual. The two matches that catch my eye are the ones involving Novak Djokovic v. Kei Nishikori and Fernando Gonzalez v. Alexander Dolgopolov, Jr.
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