Lisicki breaks record with mammoth serve
After seven Grand Slam singles victories, 10 Grand Slam doubles titles, three Olympic gold medals and over $25million in prize money, very few players will find themselves in a position to outdo the imperious Venus Williams.
But 20-year-old Sabine Lisicki has done just that.
The young German blasted Williams off her perch as the fastest recorded server in a women’s tour main-draw match with a blistering effort – recorded at 210 kilometers per hour (130mph).
Ironically, Lisicki failed to win the point. Melinda Czink – her Hungarian opponent at the Commonwealth Bank Tournament of Champions in Bali – managed to hack the ball back into the court, and perhaps out of surprise more than anything else, Lisicki drove her reply a foot long of the baseline.
The mammoth serve clocks one mile an hour on Venus Williams’ monster effort at the 2007 French Open, and equals Brenda Shultz-McCarthy’s 130mph strike during qualifying for the 2006 Cincinnati tournament – a serve that the WTA had considered to be the fastest in Women’s tennis history.
Powerful World No.23 Lisicki charged on to the scene in 2008, defeating Dinara Safina in three sets at the Australian Open before going on to make the third round of her debut Grand Slam. This year on the hallowed lawns of SW19, Lisicki went even further, beating No.5 seed Svetlana Kuznetsova and No.9 seed Caroline Wozniacki to achieve a quarter-final berth at Wimbledon, before falling to Safina in three sets.
Bear in mind that Brenda Shultz-McCarthy had reached the grand old age of 36 when she struck her 130mph rocket in Cincinnati, and the scary realisation that Lisicki potentially has another sixteen years of mammoth serving ahead of her hits home.
Are you watching Andy Roddick?
