The WTA Finals have not always had close-fought matches throughout its history.
Every year, the WTA season concludes with the WTA Finals, featuring the top eight singles players and doubles teams to go head-to-head for one final tournament of the year.
The 2026 WTA Finals are already underway, and have seen world number two Aryna Sabalenka suffer a heavy defeat to Mirra Andreeva in a match where she won just four games, despite leading 4-1.
While this is a one-sided result, Sabalenka is still some way from having won the fewest amount of games in a WTA Finals match.
Marion Bartoli suffered the heaviest defeat in WTA Finals history in 2007
Marion Bartoli is a former Wimbledon champion and world number seven, but she never actually qualified for the WTA Finals automatically in her career.
Instead, in 2007, the year that Bartoli reached the Wimbledon final for the first time, the Frenchwoman was in Madrid, where the WTA Finals were held that year, as the first alternate. Bartoli was then propelled into the WTA Finals field after Serena Williams withdrew following her first round-robin due to injury.
In Bartoli’s opening match, she would face top seed Justine Henin. Henin led the head-to-head against Bartoli, but the latter had won their most recent encounter going into the WTA Finals meeting after stunning the Belgian in the Wimbledon semi-finals earlier that year.
Henin was clearly hungry for revenge and beat Bartoli 6-0, 6-0, inflicting the first ‘double bagel’ in history at the WTA Finals, which is yet to have been repeated since.
Following this dominant win, Henin admitted that revenge was on her mind, “I wanted to take revenge. Wimbledon is far away now. She was better than me that day and that was it. Now a few months later I’m fresh and in Wimbledon I was pretty tired. I had a pretty good reaction after that defeat though and it helped me.”
Although this ended any hopes of Bartoli advancing to the semi-finals, she was able to bounce back and get one round-robin win after her next opponent Jelena Jankovic retired following losing the first set. Bartoli would leave Madrid with mixed results, while Henin went on to win the WTA Finals title unbeaten.
Bartoli would return to the WTA Finals four years later in Istanbul, once again as an alternate after replacing Maria Sharapova. Sharapova had already played two matches before withdrawing due to injury, but Bartoli was able to win her only match against eventual runner-up Victoria Azarenka.
This was the last time Bartoli played at the WTA Finals, having retired from tennis before the event took place in 2013, which was the year that she became a Grand Slam champion after winning Wimbledon.
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Esta notĂcia foi originalmente publicada em: Fonte original