AUSTRALIA

Australian Open tennis follows mixed year for defending champions

January 16, 2017

Angelique Kerber and Novak Djokovic return to Melbourne to defend their titles at the 2017 Australian Open tennis tournament after confidence-eroding setbacks in 2016.

The event billed as "Melbourne’s biggest party" and a "blockbuster free weekend of entertainment" will kick off the tournament for a second year. It will serves up more Aussie bands, according to the organisers. The inaugural concert attracted over 250,000 people.

Six times Australian Open champion Djokovic, seeking to break Roy Emerson’s record of six Australian Open titles, comes into the tournament after losing to Sam Querrey at Wimbledon 2016 and to Stan Wawrinka in the 2016 United States Open.

Kerber, the Australian Open and Wimbledon champion in 2016, had late-year upsets in Hong Kong, then Beijing. The defeat of world’s number one Kerber by Daria Gavrilova sends the Russian-born Australian into the 2017 tournament in her home country with the confidence to pull off new upsets.

The year’s contestants won’t include 2008 champion Maria Sharapova, whose sentence for drug use runs until Apr 2017.

Sharapova, a five-time Grand Slam winner, was initially banned by the International Tennis Federation for two years after testing positive for meldonium at the 2016 Australian Open. On appeal, her sentence was reduced in Oct 2016 by six months. Meldonium, a heart disease drug also known as mildronate, became a banned substance on 1 Jan 2016. Sharapova argued that she was unaware the drug had been added to the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) banned list and could not "accept" the "unfairly harsh" ban.

#21878 Published: October 20, 2016