| Athlete of the Week: Tennis player Irina Camelia Begu |
| (2011-07-26) |
| Last updated: 2011-07-27 13:43 EET |
Romanian tennis player Irina-Camelia Begu won the BCR Ladies Open Romania held last week in Bucharest, with prizemoney worth a total of 100,000 Euro. Second seed Begu defeated in the finals 6-3, 7-5 Laura Pous-Tio of Spain, the sixth favorite in the competition.
Begu also won the doubles jointly with Elena Bogdan, also of Romania. They defeated Italian player Maria Elena Camerin and Turkish player Ipek Senoglu in three sets, 6-7, 7-6, 6-4. Following those results, Radio Romania International has designated Irina-Camelia Begu Athlete of the Week.
She was born in Bucharest on 26 August 1990. in 2006 she had the first great performance of her career, winning the European title for under 16s. Subsequently she kept climbing to the top of world rankings every year. In 2001, however, she missed the qualifiers for the Australian Open.
In February, though, she made a comeback in the ITF tournament in Cali, Colombia, where she defeated the five top players in the world outranking her. In March she did not play, but in April she had the best performance of her career that far. At the WTA in Marbella, Spain, Irina-Camelia Begu reached the finals after eliminating, among others, two of the 50 best women players in the world: Klara Zakopalova of the Czech Republic and Svetlana Kuznetsova of Russia.
In the finals, however, she conceded the match to Victoria Azarenka of Belarus, seed six in the world at that time. Then, in June, at the ITF in Marseilles, France, with prize money worth 100,000 dollars, she won the doubles and reached the finals in the singles.
Winning last week’s tournament in Bucharest secured a 10 rank jump in the world standings, Irina-Camelia Begu ranking46th worldwide, her best position so far. In the ATP standings she is right now the best seeded Romanian player, followed by Alexandra Dulgheru, who last week went down two places, reaching the 49th position.
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2026-06-09
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