Julia Vakulenko

Julija Olehiwna Wakulenko (Ukrainian Юлія Олегівна Вакуленко; * July 10, 1983 in Yalta, then Ukrainian SSR ) is a former Ukrainian tennis player. Your strengths are ( at a height of 1.83 m ) the mark and hard baseline shots.

Career

1998 Wakulenko became a professional player, but initially denied solely ITF tournaments. In her first tournament, she came straight to the final, in the second she took the title. In May 1999 she appeared for the first time at number 511 in the world rankings. Until her debut on the WTA Tour Wakulenko had reached two other finals at ITF tournaments before in Sopot lost the first round in July 2000. At the Australian Open in 2001, she played her first Grand Slam tournament, but failed to qualify. Even better it ran in Wimbledon and New York, where she managed each in the third qualifying round. End of the year, she was out in the world rankings for the first time among the 150 best.

In Rome Wakulenko won her first match in the main draw of a WTA tournament in 2002. A year later she made it into the top 100 after inter alia, reached the third round of the French Open and won her fourth ITF event. In January 2004, she battled into the semifinals of Canberra, their best result until then. This was followed by the quarter-finals of Estoril and the second round at the U.S. Open, where she forced the world number two, Amélie Mauresmo in a third set. The 2005 season began for Wakulenko only in May. At Wimbledon, she then played their best tentatively match against two -time Grand Slam champion Mary Pierce, who was defeated after 2 hours and 40 minutes and two match points awarded with 6:4, 6:7, 7:9.

After recurrent injuries and the stagnation of their world ranking, she decided to take a break from the women's tennis for an indefinite period. A year later she returned and found with 16 victories during the clay court season again connection. In May 2007, she finished with her first victory over a top 5 player of the career of Kim Clijsters - for them it meant to enter the top 50 in the week it was Wakulenko with victories over Amélie Mauresmo and Dinara Safina in Berlin the second and third top-10 player beat. After the dry spell in the American summer she could beat at the U.S. Open Daniela Hantuchova and reach the fourth round. In Linz, she denied her first final on the tour, which she lost to Lindsay Davenport. She reached on 19 November 2007 with number 32 in the world ranking their best ever placing. The end of 2009 it was listed at number 194. Since the 2010 Australian Open she is more taken up in any WTA tournament.

As Wakulenko was seven years old, her parents divorced. She moved with her mother to their new partner to Belgrade (then the capital of Yugoslavia ) and only once had to learn the language. First, they played tennis on clay courts exclusively. Later she moved to Spain, where she trained in the Mouratoglou Tennis Academy. Wakulenko is fluent in Russian, English, Spanish and Serbian.