Doubles Take: Olga Danilovic doubles up in Lausanne, Will Blumberg defends Newport crown

The ATP and WTA tours resume regular-season play after a wild Wimbledon. Doubles Take looks at the latest results.

A Week to Remember

After a stellar junior career, Olga Danilovic quickly made a mark at the senior level, winning a clay-court event in Moscow back in 2018. The years, since, though have had their fair share of ups and downs, but the daughter of famed basketball star Predrag Danilovic put everything together in Lausanne last week as she reached her first singles final since that Moscow run four years ago.

And she didn’t do too shabby on the doubles court, either.

Playing with reigning French Open doubles champion Kristina Mladenovic, Danilovic reached her third career team final. Set to face Ulrikke Eikeri and Tamara Zidansek in the championship match, Danilovic and Mladenovic were gifted the title when the second seeds were forced to withdraw before the match.

While it wasn’t the ideal way to win, it still capped off a remarkable week for Danilovic, who won her first title in four years. Mladenovic, meanwhile, captured the 26th doubles title of her career.

Recapturing that Winning Feeling

Danilovic wasn’t the only player on the WTA Tour that ended a title drought over the weekend.

In Budapest, Hungary, fourth seeds Oksana Kalashnikova and Ekaterine Gorgodze breezed through their first three matches to reach the final, with their run including a semifinal win over top seeds Laura Siegemund and Shuai Zhang. That set up a championship match against the unseeded duo of Katarzyna Piter and Kimberley Zimmermann. The fourth-seeded Georgians dropped the opening set, but rallied to take the match in a super tiebreak.

With the win, Kalashnikova picked up her fifth title and first in nearly five years, while Gorgodze won the second of her career. Her first came last October in Romania, which is definitely a drop in the ocean time-wise compared with her countrywoman as far as space between titles go.

Too Tough on the Turf

What do you get when you take one of the defending doubles champs in Newport and put him on the same side of the court with a former singles winner at the grass-court event?

Throw in the fact that they’re two of the greatest college tennis players of all time, and odds are you have a pretty strong combo.

Will Blumberg, who won the title last year with Jack Sock, defended his crown, teaming up with 2018 singles champ Steve Johnson this year. The American duo, playing for the first time together, beat top seeds Raven Klaasen and Marcelo Melo in straight sets in the final. The fourth seeds barely made it out of the opening round, but got into a groove from there. It’s the second title for each of the NCAA legends, one that has taken Blumberg to the cusp of the top 100 in doubles.

How Swede It Is

“However, the heavy favorites for the title are Rafael Matos and David Vega Hernandez, clay-court doubles standouts who are actually coming off a strong stretch on grass.”

That quote came from none other than last week's Doubles Take. Turns out, one would be hard-pressed to find a more accurate call.

Matos and Vega Hernandez won their third title of the year together, eking out a victory against the second seeds Fabio Fognini and Simone Bolelli in a 13-11 match tiebreak in the final. Survival was the word for Matos and Vega Hernandez all week as three of their four matches went the distance. Since the French Open, the Brazilian-Spanish duo has run up a 13-2 record, with that mark lifting them each to career-highs in the rankings.

This Week

It’s all clay, all the time in main-tour action for both the men and the women. They’re convening in Hamburg, Germany, where Marcel Granollers and Horacio Zeballos lead the field on the men’s side. The top seeds face a tough opener against Santiago Gonzalez and Andres Molteni, two-time titlists this year. Granollers and Zeballos hope to avoid the fate of Neal Skupski and Wesley Koolhof, the second seeds, who failed their first-round test against Harri Heliovaara and Lloyd Glasspool. On the women’s side, top seeds Irina Bara and Monica Niculescu are through to the quarterfinals, while third seeds Miyu Kato and Aldila Sutjiadi have advanced to the semis.

The men are also taking their turn in Switzerland this week, as they hit the long-running event in Gstaad. Top seeds Rafael Matos and David Vega Hernandez will try to win their second tournament in as many weeks, with two major contenders already out of the way: The second and third seeds dropped their first-round matches. At the WTA tournament in Palermo, Italy, top seeds Alexa Guarachi and Asia Muhammad have advanced to the quarterfinals, but fourth seeds Ingrid Neel and Renata Voracova were upset in their opener.