MOSCOW
Top seed tennis player Jelena Jankovic crashed out of the Kremlin Cup at the first hurdle in a 6-1 6-2 thrashing by Kazakh teenager Zarina Diyas on Thursday.
Serbia’s former world number one, who had a bye in the first round, looked out of sorts from the start, committing numerous errors and winning only 43 percent of her first serves. The 268th-ranked Diyas beat her in less than an hour.
Diyas, who had not won a tour match this year before this week, now takes on sixth-seeded Maria Kirilenko in Friday’s quarter-finals after the Russian whitewashed Ukraine’s Kateryna Bondarenko 6-0 6-0 in the earlier match on center court.
Jankovic became the latest high-profile casualty at the annual ATP and WTA indoor tournament that had been already decimated by the withdrawals of top players, particularly on the women’s side.
Men’s top seed Nikolay Davydenko was beaten in his opening match while his Russian compatriot, champion and second seed Mikhail Youzhny, pulled out with a virus infection on Wednesday.
Russians Vera Zvonareva, Svetlana Kuznetsova and Maria Sharapova as well as Italy’s 2009 champion Francesca Schiavone all pulled out in the runup to the event.
