Chani Scheepers.
Photo: Getty Images
South African tennis star Chani Scheepers is hoping to win through to the finals of the Wimbledon women’s doubles today.
The South African number 1 continues to impress on the WTA doubles tour with Japanese partners.
By reaching the semi-finals on Wednesday, Scheepers became the first South African woman to do so since Liezel Huber won the title with Cara Black of Zimbabwe in 2007.
Prior to that, Mariaan de Swardt was the only other South African to reach the semi-finals, or better, of the doubles at the Championships since 1999.
In 1999 de Swardt and partner Elena Tartakova of Ukraine lost in the Wimbledon final. De Swardt and Tartakova were beaten by top seeded American’s Lindsay Davenport and Corina Morariu.
Today in the semi-finals, Scheepers and Aoyama will have to pull out all the stops when they come up against 8 seeds Su-Wei Hsieh (Taipei) and Shuai Peng (China).
“It’s so exciting to be in the Wimbledon semi-finals! It still feels a bit like a dream right now. I only teamed up with Shuko at the last minute and we had a tough first round match so we really weren’t expecting too much.
But we just played our game and got through that match and just kept going each round” said Scheepers.
