By Tennis Now | Sunday, May 6, 2018
Reigning champion Simona Halep thrashed Ekaterina Makarova, 6-1, 6-0, stretching her Madrid winning streak to 13 matches.
Photo credit: @MutuaMadridOpen
World No. 1 Simona Halep and Caroline Wozniacki transformed Madrid openers into emphatic shutdown statements.
The top-seeded Halep launched her Madrid title defense annihilating Ekaterina Makarova, 6-1, 6-0, extending her Mutua Madrid Open winning streak to 13 matches.
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The two-time defending champion raced through seven straight games wrapping up a 52-minute rout.
In her first match since she was blown out by CoCo Vandeweghe in the Stuttgart quarterfinals, Halep was a commanding presence from the first ball.
The 32nd-ranked Russian was powerless against the Romanian's ruthless return game. Halep won 78 percent of the points played on Makarova's second serve, defeating the left-hander for the fifth time in seven matches.
Playing clean combinations, Halep hit 11 winners against just eight unforced errors, compared to Makarova's 30 unforced errors and 10 winners.
Halep will meet the winner of the all-Belgian clash between Elise Mertens and Alison Van Uytvanck in round two.
The two-time Roland Garros runner-up is defending 1,000 ranking points in Madrid and must out-perform second-ranked Caroline Wozniacki to retain the world No. 1 ranking.
Wozniacki was overwhelming in her opener.
The second-ranked Dane drove through nine of the last 10 games dismissing Daria Gavrilova, 6-3, 6-1, to reach the second round.
Deadlocked at 3-all, the Australian Open champion went into overdrive, moving Gavrilova corner-to-corner rolling through nine of the final 10 games to close in 89 minutes.
Playing her first match since an abdominal injury forced her to retire from the Istanbul Open quarterfinals, Wozniacki looked fit and played fast raining her 2018 record to 20-6.
Next up for Wozniacki is either former French Open finalist Sara Errani or Ashleigh Barty.