SYDNEY, January 10. /TASS/. Russian tennis player Lyudmila Samsonova retired on Friday after suffering an injury in her semifinals match against Madison Keys of the United States at the 2025 WTA (the Women’s Tennis Association) Adelaide International tennis tournament in Australia.
The unseeded Russian, who was playing as a neutral at the tournament, requested a medical timeout during the match’s first set, eventually bowing out in the third despite being up 5-7; 7-5; 3-0 against her US opponent.
Keys, 29, will now move on to the finals of the 2025 Adelaide International tournament, where she will await the winner of the other semifinals encounter between Kazakhstan’s Yulia Putintseva and the tournament’s top seed, Jessica Pegula of the United States.
Samsonova, 26, is currently ranked 26th in the Women’s Tennis Association Rankings and has five career WTA titles. Playing on the Grand Slam circuit, she has made it as far as Round 4 (2021 Wimbledon and 2022, 2024 US Open). In 2021, she won the Billie Jean King Cup as part of the Russian national team.
The Adelaide International is a WTA 500 tennis tournament, which first took place in 2020. It is played on outdoor hard courts. This year, the tournament runs between January 6 and 11 and offers a purse of over $1.06 million in prize money. Latvia’s Jelena Ostapenko is the tournament’s reigning champion, but she was knocked out of this year’s tournament in Round 2 by Madison Keys.
Russian players’ neutral status at tennis tournaments
On February 28, 2022, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) issued recommendations to international sports federations to bar athletes from Russia and Belarus from taking part in international tournaments, citing Moscow’s special military operation in Ukraine as the reason.
Following the IOC’s recommendations in late February 2022, the majority of global sports federations decided to bar athletes from Russia and Belarus from all international sports tournaments.
The International Tennis Federation (ITF) ruled on March 1, 2022 to suspend the membership of the Russian and Belarusian national tennis federations while also canceling all previously scheduled tennis tournaments in the two countries.
On March 14, 2022, the ITF also confirmed its prohibition of the Russian and Belarusian national tennis teams from the 2022 Davis Cup and 2022 Billie Jean King Cup.