Swiss tennis player Stan Wawrinka, winner of three Grand Slam tournaments, will return after a little over a year out of competition at the Andalusian Open, which will be held from March 27 to April 3 at the Puente Romano club in Marbella, its organizers announced on Monday.
A serious injury to his left foot led the 36-year-old Swiss, number three in the world in 2014, to undergo surgery twice and It has kept him away from the courts since March 8, 2021, when he lost in the first round of the Doha tournament (Qatar) against South African Lloyd Harris. Wawrinka, who spent three consecutive years in the top four of the world ranking between 2014 and 2016, has sixteen ATP titles and one Olympic gold in the men’s doubles modality that he achieved in Beijing 2008 together with his compatriot Roger Federer.
In his almost twenty years of professional career He has achieved more than 500 victories and is the only player to beat the “Big 4” (Djokovic, Nadal, Federer and Murray) in both Grand Slam and on clayhis favorite surface and on which the ‘AnyTech365 Andalucía Open 2022’ will be played, the organization highlighted in its presentation.
Among the surprises this ATP Challenger 250 tournament, which his son Florian has joined as director to replace the late Ronnie Leitgeb, is the celebration for the first time this year of a Women’s WTA 125 in which sixteen tennis players who are among the best one hundred in the world have already confirmed their attendance. Among them, the Belgian Alison Van Uytvanck, number 55 on the WTA list and seeded in the Marbella tournament; the Dutch Arantxa Rus, who ranks 63; the Egyptian Mayar Sherif, number 67; and the Ukrainian nationalized Belgian Maryna Zanevska, located in position 68 in the world ranking. They are joined by the French Kristina Mladenovic, winner of five Grand Slams in doubles and who was in the world ‘top-10’; the Croatian Donna Vekic, who reached the 19th position in 2019 and has three WTA titles; the same amount as the Slovakian Anna Karolina Schmiedlova, also registered among the twenty-six confirmed players.
At the tournament presentation the figure of Ronnie Leitgeb, who died suddenly at the age of 62 last February, was remembered and of whom the president of the Royal Spanish Tennis Federation, Miguel Díaz, highlighted that he was the “alma mater” of this competition. Regarding Leitgeb’s announced intention to transfer its Lyon tournament license to Marbella with a view to 2023, his son Florian, new director of the Andalusian Open, commented that it is something that will be seen, since it is necessary to go “step by step”in addition to thanking the support of the sponsors and the authorities.
Together with the president of the Spanish Tennis Federation and the director of the tournament, The presentation was attended by the founder and CEO of AnyTech365, Janus Nielsen; the Secretary General for Sport of the Junta de Andalucía, José María Arrabal; the Councilor for Sports of Marbella, Manuel Cardeña and the director of Puente Romano Beach Resort, Gonzalo Rodríguez.