For the fifth time in Open Era history, a women’s tennis match has taken more than four hours to complete with Laura Siegemund and Wang Xiyu entering the record books thanks to their Thailand Open clash.
Qualifier Martina Trevisan took on Marie Bouzkova in the first round of the 2021 Indian Wells Open and the pair slugged it out for nearly four hours with the Italian coming out on top with a 6-4, 6-7 (8-10), 6-4 win.
Italian Trevisan then retired injured from her match in the second round.
Lesia Tsurenko and Kamilla Rakhimova met in the second round of the Budapest Open in 2022 and they played and played and played.
Interestingly, only one of the sets went to the tie-breaker and it was unsurprisingly the longest match of 2022 as the Ukrainian won 6-7 (1-7), 6-4, 7-5.
Sara Sorribes Tormo and Camila Giorgi hit the list at No 6 after their three-hour and 51-minute encounter in the first round of the 2021 Italian Open.
The first set lasted one hour and 18 minutes, the second was one hour and 33 minutes and the decider “only” 59 minutes as Sorribes Tormo won 7-6 (7-4), 6-7 (7-9), 7-5.
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Georgian Ekaterine Gorgodze came through qualifying at the 2021 Poland Open and made it to the quarter-final where she met Kristina Kucova.
And they played for days… okay just for three hours and 55 minutes before the Slovakian emerged with a 6-7 (4-7), 7-6 (9-7), 7-6 (7-3) victory.
Kucova went on to win the finish runner-up.
The oldest match on the list goes back to the 1972 French Open when Kerry Melville Reid and Pam Teeguarden’s match was just five minutes shy of four hours.
The match – won 7-6(7), 4-6, 16-14 by Australian Melville Reid – topped the list for more than a decade before sliding down the order.
The first-ever four-hour women’s Grand Slam tennis match in the Open Era took place in 1995 with Virginie Buisson and Noelle van Lottum battling it out for 247 minutes in total at the French Open.
Buisson won the encounter between the two French wildcards, securing a 6-7 (3-7), 7-5, 6-2 victory.
Laura Siegemund and Wang Xiyu joined the top 10 in 2024 with their second-round encounter at the Thailand Open. Siegemund triumphed 7-6 (7-3), 4-6, 7-6 (7-1) shortly after the four-hour mark.
All three sets lasted more than an hour with the decider taking one hour and 39 minutes before the chair umpire announced “game, set and match”.
There were two breaks of serve in the opening set, five in the second set and four in the second set.
“In this kind of match you will have ups and downs, and most likely the reason is physical. So to bounce back from that and stay mentally strong is important,” Siegemund said after the match.
Barbora Strycova and Regina Kulikova spent 259 minutes on court in the first round at the 2010 Australian, which – at the time – was the longest effort in Grand Slams.
After the opening two sets were settled via tie-breakers, Strycova “eased” home with a 7-6 (7-5), 6-7 (10-12), 6-3 victory.
Francesca Schiavone and Svetlana Kuznetsova were clearly the WTA’s marathon women as they also played a three-hour 50-minute clash at the 2015 French Open. However, for this particular match, Italian and Russian slugged it out for four hours and 44 minutes at the 2011 Australian Open.
Schiavone won 6-7 (11-13), 7-5, 10-8, saying afterwards: “It was for me personally really fantastic.
“I hope one day to show this DVD to my son. It is one of the most emotional moments of my life. I just told myself to keep going, do it with the heart and go for it.”
Russian Kuznetsova admitted it was a hard pill to swallow.
“I just feel very empty,” she said. “Maybe in a few days I will watch the video and understand more about it. It’s too hard to talk about it right now.”
Vicki Nelson-Dunbar and Jean Hepner’s 1984 first-round clash in Richmond took an incredible 391 minutes to complete.
Nelson-Dunbar won the match that, incredibly, was only two sets as she secured a 6-4, 7-6 (13-11) victory.
And even more bizarrely, the tie-breaker alone lasted one hour and 47 minutes with one rally featuring a mind-blowing 643 shots and taking 29 minutes to complete.
