Looking Back to the 2004 Beijing Final

To set the mood here for the China Open in Beijing this week, let's have a look back at  the most memorable match in the event's short history.  That distinction, in my mind, goes to the championship of the inaugural China Open in 2004, which pitted Serena Williams against Svetlana Kuznetsova, two players whose careers were headed in completely different directions at the time.

Svetlana Kuznetsova was skyrocketing.  She was by far the hottest player in tennis at the time, fresh off her completely unexpected US Open win earlier that month, having also won Bali the week in between the US Open and Beijing.  She was on a sixteen match win streak that included victories over Lindsay Davenport, Elena Dementieva, and Maria Sharapova.  Russians had won the last three majors, and Kuznetsova was being touted by many as the one of the three Russian grand slam champions (the other two being Anastasia Myskina and Sharapova) with the most potential to become an all-time great.

Serena Williams, on the other hand, was struggling in a way she hadn't in years.  She had failed to win a grand slam title in a year for he first time since 2001, after having won three in 2002 and two in 2003.  Her loss in the finals of Wimbledon to Maria Sharapova had taken away much of her air of invincibility, as Serena lost for the first time on a big stage to a member of a a much younger and comparably powerful generation.  The Wimbledon loss was followed by her controversial loss to Jennifer Capriati in the US Open quarterfinals, the match that eventually proved to be the impetus for the HawkEye challenge system.

You can watch the final chapter of the match below. Look out for a surprise gift, and listen to how the enthusiastic (but unfamiliar with traditional tennis etiquette) Chinese crowd makes all sorts of excited noise throughout the points.

Serena's win in Beijing put her back on the right, if only for a short time.  She made the finals of the Year-End Championships (a bizarre see-saw match vs. Sharapova), then won the next grand slam, the 2005 Australian Open. 

Kuznetsova, contrastingly, never regained the type of form she had in the fall of 2004.  She has won a few big titles since, but the confidence and consistency she played with at the age of nineteen has never returned.