Serena Williams powered to a record 307th Grand Slam match win yesterday to reach the fourth round of the US Open.
Williams moved ahead of Martina Navratilova for most match wins in the majors by a woman, and tied Roger Federer’s mark for men with a 6-2, 6-1 pasting of Sweden’s Johanna Larsson.
The American superstar, seeking a record seventh US Open title, next faces Kazakhstan’s Yaroslava Shvedova, a 6-2, 7-5 winner over China’s Zhang Shuai.
“That’s pretty awesome,” Williams said of surpassing Navratilova. “And what better place to do than here where it all started.”
Williams claimed the first of her 22 Grand Slam singles titles at the US Open in 1999. A 23rd major triumph would take her past the Open Era record she now shares with Steffi Graf and closer to Margaret Court’s all-time record of 24.
Although a right shoulder injury had left Williams looking vulnerable since her triumph at Wimbledon, she needed just an hour to subdue Larsson, the world number 47 who has never made it past the third round of a Grand slam and had lost in the first round of her six prior US Open appearances.
“It was a really good match for me, because she played a different kind of game,” Williams said. “It was really good for me to have a different type of rhythm and just move the ball around. So overall it was pretty good.”
Meanwhile, Hungarian Timea Babos put a scare into Romanian fifth seed Simona Halep, surging back in the second set and taking a 3-1 lead in the third before falling 6-1, 2-6, 6-4.
“I don’t know how I came back,” said Halep, whose unforced errors skyrocketed in the second set. “I was fighting to the very end for every ball.”
Having regained the break to level the third at 3-3, Halep was unable to convert two break points in the eighth game. But Babos, unable to convert two game points in the 10th, finally surrendered with a whimper with a double fault on match point.
Halep, who fell in the semi-finals to eventual champion Flavia Pennetta last year, will play Spain’s Carla Suarez Navarro for place in the quarter-finals.
Suarez celebrated her 28th birthday with a 6-4, 6-3 victory over Russian Elena Vesnina.
There was no such drama for fourth seed Agnieszka Radwanska, who needed 70 minutes to defeat France’s Caroline Garcia 6-2, 6-3.
Sixth seed Venus Williams, whose seven Grand Slam titles include US Open crowns in 2000 and 2001, opens the night session on Ashe against 26th-seeded Laura Siegemund in the first meeting between the two.