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A Young Canadian Star Breaks into the Big Stage

In one of the biggest surprises of the season on the tennis courts, young Canadian Victoria Mboko managed to defeat Japanese Naomi Osaka, a four-time Grand Slam champion, by winning 2-6, 6-4, 6-1 in the final of the Montreal 1000-point tournament.

Mboko (18 years old) claimed her first professional tournament title in her very first final, denying Osaka her first title since the 2021 Australian Open.

Mboko, who started this season ranked outside the top 300 in the WTA rankings and began the week ranked 85th, is expected to rise to 34th worldwide after winning the title on home soil, where around 11,000 spectators watched her in the stadium.

Mboko had previously knocked out American Sofia Kenin, the Australian Open champion, in the second round, then defeated another American, Coco Gauff, who recently won the French Open, in the fourth round, before beating Kazakh Elena Rybakina, a former Wimbledon champion, in the semifinals.

Meanwhile, Mboko will miss the Cincinnati 1000-point tournament, which started yesterday, while Osaka will be among the participants in the final stop before the start of the US Open, the last of the four Grand Slams.

It is worth noting that the start of the Cincinnati tournament saw veteran American Venus Williams exit in the first round after losing to Spanish Jessica Bouzas Maneiro 4-6, 4-6.

This is Williams’s second tournament in three weeks, after returning to the courts in the Washington 500-point tournament, marking her first participation after 16 months away. She won her first-round match but lost to Polish player Magdalena Fręch.

Williams has previously competed in Cincinnati 10 times, reaching the semifinals in 2012, and in her last appearance in 2023, she was eliminated in the second round by China’s Zheng Qinwen.

An Important Title for Shelton as Well

Meanwhile, Ben Shelton, ranked seventh in the world, became the first American player to win a Masters tournament in Canada in over two decades after defeating Russian Karen Khachanov, ranked 16th, with a score of 6-7 (5-7), 6-4, 6-4, 7-6 (7-3) in the final of the Toronto 1000-point tournament.

Thanks to this achievement, Shelton (22 years old) will move up one place to sixth in the world rankings, surpassing Serbian star Novak Djokovic, who has won 24 Grand Slam titles.

After a match lasting two hours and 45 minutes, Khachanov lost the chance to win his second Masters title, six years after his victory at the Paris Bercy tournament in 2018.

This is Shelton’s third career title after winning the Tokyo tournament in Japan in 2023 and the Houston tournament in the United States in 2024.

In a week full of upsets and historic wins on the tennis courts, fans in Lebanon can make the most of the action by backing their predictions on Betway, the country’s leading online betting platform.

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