LONDON, July 8. /TASS/. Russian tennis player Andrey Rublev advanced to the fourth round of this year’s Wimbledon tennis tournament after beating David Goffin of Belgium on Friday.

The match to see who advances to the 4th Round of the Wimbledon tennis championship ended after four sets, 6:3, 6:7 (6:8), 7:6 (7:5), 6:2, in favor of Rublev.

In Round 4, the seventh-seed Rublev will face Alexander Bublik (seed 23rd) of Kazakhstan.

Rublev, 25, is currently ranked 7th in the ATP’s World Rankings. He is the winner of 13 ATP tournaments. He has also appeared in numerous Grand Slam tournaments, never going further than the quarterfinals. While playing for the Russian national team, he took home the gold at the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo in mixed doubles (with teammate Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova) and also won the 2021 Davis Cup.

Goffin, 32, is ranked 123rd and holds six ATP titles. Like Rublev, he has never advanced further than quarterfinals at Grand Slam tournaments.

The Wimbledon tournament, the most prestigious out of the four Grand Slam tournaments, has been held annually in London since 1877. This year’s Wimbledon runs between July 3 and 16 and has $56.3 million in prize money up for grabs.

Russia is represented this year in men’s singles by Daniil Medvedev, Andrey Rublev and Aslan Karatsev. Russia’s Karen Khachanov announced earlier that he would skip this year’s tournament because of a bad back.

The women’s draw at the tournament includes six Russians: Daria Kasatkina, Veronika Kudermetova, Lyudmila Samsonova, Yekaterina Aleksandrova, Anastasia Potapova and Mirra Andreeva.

In 2022, Wimbledon organizers, the AELTC and the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), announced a decision to bar Russian and Belarusian players from participating in the 2022 edition of the tournament, citing Russia’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine as the reason for the ban.

This year, Wimbledon organizers - the AELTC and the LTA - announced a decision to allow Russian and Belarusian players to participate in the tournament as neutrals and under several conditions.

Specifically, athletes from the two countries should not be "actively supporting" Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, must compete under a neutral status and must not be financed by the governments of Russia or Belarus, or by state-run companies from either country.

Following the ban of Russian and Belarusian players from Wimbledon last year, the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) announced decisions to strip Wimbledon of ranking points due to its move to ban Russian and Belarusian athletes from competing at the 2022 Grand Slam tournament in London, as it violated the fundamental principles stipulating that players of any nationality can enter tournaments based on their merits and without any type of discrimination. President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Thomas Bach also criticized at that time Wimbledon organizers’ decision to bar players from Russia and Belarus.