Ipek Senoglu's Istanbul Blog: Thursday
Published July 29, 2010 12:00
ISTANBUL, Turkey - Come along to the Istanbul Cup with Turkish tennis pioneer Ipek Senoglu, one of the favorites for this week's doubles title.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Hi everyone,
One more Istanbul Cup has finished and our winners are Anastasia Pavluychenkova in singles and Woehr/Daniilidou in dubs... congrats to all! I was especially happy that the dubs final was good quality and three out of the four players were just dubs players.
There's no more Istanbul Cup next year due to the Championships next year, but who knows, maybe I'll be your guys' blog person again :)
Thx for reading my blogs...
Ipek
Thursday, July 29, 2010
They say New York is the city that never sleeps... however I must admit that everytime I do come to Istanbul and go out, I think the same for Istanbul.
Last night we had the players night, where Turkey's minister of transport, Mr. Binali Yildirim and minister of sports, Mr. Faruk Ozak, were among the guests, along with Turkish Tennis Federation board members and our CEO, Stacey Allaster. I was excited to see so many important figures to show interest and support in Turkish tennis.
Like most of you know, I was the first female Turk to ever play in a Grand Slam, so it makes me very proud and happy to see that tennis in my country is growing very fast. We will be holding the year-end championships in 2011, 2012 and 2013, so there's that excitement as well...
Okay, let's talk about the party. Most players attended including Schiavone, Danilidou, Woehr, Lefèvre, Kondratieva, Domachowksa and Schnyder.
There was one parent there who I would like to talk about. Andrea Petkovic's father seems like a father type that we need to see more often on the tour. He's helping his daughter on and off court without forgetting that he should be there a a father first. I do like when parents are able to back off at times and let their "little princesses" grow up by their own mistakes. So as a result, we see someone like Andrea Petkovic, who is not only a great tennis player but is also very intelligent and funny, and interested in different parts of life other than just tennis. I believe the more players we have like her, the more we can give back to our sport during and after our careers.
Elena Baltacha beat Francesca Schiavone today and I must say the Turkish crowd was disappointed as they wanted to see Francesca through the final, however that is a great vicotry for Elena so today's congrats go to her!
I'll spy on the tournament site and write you guys back again tomorrow.
Good night!
Ipek
