Fourth-seeded American team of Liezel Huber (R) and Lisa Raymond kiss their trophy at the U.S. Open, Sept. 11, 2011. They won the women's doubles final at the U.S. Open on Sunday by outlasting defening champions Vania King and Yaroslava Shvedova. (Xinhua Photo)? |
Fourth-seeded American team of Liezel Huber and Lisa Raymond won the women's doubles final at the U.S. Open on Sunday by outlasting defening champions Vania King and Yaroslava Shvedova.
The American pair beat third-seeded duo of American King and Kazakhstan's Shvedova 4-6, 7-6 (5), 7-6 (3).
It's the six Grand Slam title of women's doubles for 38-year-old Raymond, who won also her third US Open doubles championship, the last coming in 2005, when she teamed with Sam Stosur, who overpowered Serena Williams 6-2, 6-3 to win the US Open women's singles in a later match.
Raymond and Huber saved match point trailing 5-4 in the second set, then got to the third-set tiebreaker.
After winning the point to go ahead 6-2, Huber started celebrating, thinking they had won.
Two points later, they actually did, and Huber, who teamed with Nadia Petrova last year, avenged a loss to the King and Shedova team, who won last year's Wimbledon, in the 2010 final.
The winning pair will carve up a prize of 420,000 dollars.
Huber and Raymond overcame Slovakia's Daniel Hantuchova and Poland's Agnieszka Radwanska, 6-2, 6-4 to reach the final on Friday.
King and Shvedova upended the fifth-seeded Russian tandem of Maria Kirilenko and Nadia Petrova, 7-6 (9-7), 2-6, 6-3 in another semifinal.