Posted on by Willem

Thursday/ at the Japan Open 🇯🇵🎾

I should have stayed on in Tokyo for another week so that I could catch some of the action at the Japan Open ATP 500 men’s tennis tournament there.

World No. 1 Carlos Alcaraz (🇪🇸, 22) made his debut in Japan there, today.
He scared everybody with an ankle injury in the first set of his match, but recovered to beat Argentinian Sebastian Baez (🇦🇷, 24) by 6-4, 6-2 in the second round.

Here is my picture from last Friday on the elevated Yurikamome Line.
The structures on the left of the track are in Ariake Tennis no Mori Park with its center court Ariake Coliseum.

The tennis park opened in 1983 with 32 hard courts. It was extensively renovated to serve as the tennis venue for the 2020 Summer Olympics and today houses a total of 49 tennis courts (33 hard courts and 16 artificial grass courts with sand infill).
Look for the elevated Yurikamome Line on the left of the picture. The Ariake Tennis no Mori Park train station is towards the top right of the picture. 
[Graphic from Olympic and Paralympic Games TOKYO2020 website]
Here’s Carlos at the start of his match against Sebastian Baez— his buzz cut from the US Open now grown out a little (and bleached silver, not blond, he says).
Carlos is doing a Japanese bow as he greets the representative from Kinoshita Group (I couldn’t get his name). The man in the middle is the umpire of the match, Fergus Murphy from Dublin, Ireland.
[Still from TennisTV coverage of the match]

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