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Cruising at the Kremlin Hingis drops only one game in Moscow opener
MOSCOW (AP) -- World No. 1 Martina Hingis of Switzerland crushed Kveta Hrdlickova of the Czech Republic 6-0, 6-1 in the second round of the $2.05 million Kremlin Cup on Wednesday, comfortably breezing into the quarterfinals. Hingis won 9 games in a row before Hrdlickova could hold her serve in the tenth game. She closed the match in just 40 minutes -- the shortest match at the tournament so far -- with a crowd-pleasing forehand volley. "She has just come from playing very well in the Linz semifinals," Hingis said of Hrdlickova. "So I was under pressure. I wanted to make it even better." In the quarterfinals, Hingis will face Sydney Olympic silver medalist Elena Dementieva of Russia, seeded seventh, who struggled past Silvia Farina-Elia of Italy 2-6, 6-4, 6-4 in a tough second-round match that lasted two hours. In first round action, No. 8 Barbara Schett of Austria beat Elena Likhovtsva of Russia in straight sets, 6-4, 6-1. Both players held their serve until the ninth game of the first set when Schett broke the Russian at love and then won six consecutive games. She came back from 15-40 on her serve in the final game to close the match in 59 minutes. In other matches early Wednesday, Russia's Tatiana Panova, who upset sixth-seeded Julie Halard-Decugis of France in the first round, reached the quarterfinals by eliminating Paola Suarez of Argentina 6-4, 4-6, 6-1. In men's first-round play, sixth-seeded Max Mirnyi of Belarus fired 13 aces to route Kristian Pless of Denmark 7-6 (10-8), 6-1 and Sweden's Jonas Bjorkman ousted Tuomas Ketola of Finland, 6-2, 7-5. The winner of the women's event will get $166,000 prize money while the men's champion will receive a check for $137,000.
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