MELBOURNE, Australia — Varvara
Lepchenko did a little jump as the
forehand return of the No. 11 seed
Simona Halep of Romania sailed long,
giving the American a 5-1 lead just 22
minutes into her second round match
in the Australian Open.
Less than an hour later, Lepchenko,
who won the first set, had lost five
straight games. She staggered to her
chair, sat down and began to sob and
shake. She covered her face with a
towel and pushed her white visor off
her head and onto the ground.
A trainer arrived and draped a towel
filled with ice around the trembling
player’s neck. She then helped
Lepchenko lie down across the bench
where she was sitting and took her
blood pressure from her left arm —
the same left arm that had swung a
racket minutes before — as the 27-
year-old player tried to sip from her
bottle of water. Then a thermometer
was poked into Lepchenko’s ear to
take her temperature, which the
trainer said was ‘'not too bad.'’ Then
she reached across Lepchenko’s body
to measure her pulse from her right
wrist.
Soon, another person, a doctor,
arrived. After asking Lepchenko if she was
feeling sick or cramping — she said
she was only feeling dizzy — the
doctor began to rub her legs with
bags of ice. Lepchenko covered her
face again, this time with the ice-
filled towel, and again began to cry.
When the three minutes allowed for
a medical timeout had passed,
Lepchenko stood slowly, and the
dozens of fans who sat only in the
small alcoves of shade provided by
trees applauded as she returned to
her feet. Lepchenko lost the final
game of the second set quickly, and
then the heat rule for women’s
matches provided for a 10-minute
break before the start of the third set.
Lepchenko’s prospects of winning
looked little better after the brief
respite. After having lost 11 straight
games, Lepchenko finally held serve
for 1-5 in the third set, a moral
victory that would have to
compensate for the impossibility of
an actual win. Halep won the match
four points later, 4-6, 6-0, 6-1.
Lepchenko then left the court,
walked back into the locker room,
and climbed into an ice bath. When
she got out, she lay down in the
locker room.
“I just couldn’t physically get up,” she
said, having eventually made it to a
small interview room an hour after
her match ended. “I’m feeling still a
little bit weak, feel like I want to sit
down all the time, and lay down. Not
so great, you know.”
Lepchenko, who grew up in the dry
heat of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, before
moving to the United States, said she
had never experienced anything like
what happened to her on Thursday.
“It just happened to me for the first
time in my life that I was playing
under these conditions, and it got on
the worse side of me,” she said. “At
first, I didn’t understand what was
going on, but then my legs, my arms,
started to get heavier, and I started —
I couldn’t focus, one point, and start
feeling dizzy and dizzier. I tried
everything, and unfortunately I just
couldn’t continue playing at 100
percent.”
Lepchenko said she first began to feel
unwell during the seventh game of
the match, and that her condition
deteriorated from there.
“On my returns, I couldn’t see the
ball,” she said. “It was just like one
step leading to another, and towards
the middle of the second set I started
feeling more and more dizzy. I
already knew, and everything started
going so fast, and I felt like time was
going so fast and I needed more time
in between the points. I started
feeling really hot on the top of my
head, and then just at one point I
completely lost it.”
Lepchenko had played in similar heat
on Tuesday, but despite a preparatory
regime of ice baths and a mantra of
“fluids, fluids, fluids,” the cumulative
effect of two matches in extreme heat
was too much.
“I thought I had done everything
possible,” she said.
Shortly after Lepchenko’s match
ended, play was halted on outer
courts after the completion of the
current set, and did not resume for
roughly four hours, until 6 p.m.
That was little relief for players like
Lepchenko, who was first in the day’s
order of play and had no choice but
to compete on a shadeless court in
the early afternoon heat.
“I think they should have started
matches after the temperature cooled
down a little bit,” Lepchenko said.
“Because this is just too much.”
Several top players got the luxury of
playing matches under one of the
retractable roofs of the tournament’s
two largest stadiums while play on
outdoor courts was suspended.
In a match with wild momentum
swings, the No. 10 seed Caroline
Wozniacki defeated the American
Christina McHale 6-0, 1-6, 6-2 in Rod
Laver Arena.
The top men’s seed, Rafael Nadal,
followed her on court for a 6-2, 6-4,
6-2 win over Thanasi Kokkinakis, a
17-year-old Australian wild card.
In the first match of the night session,
the two-time defending champion
Victoria Azarenka beat Barbora
Zahlavova Strycova 6-1, 6-4.
In a rare visit to the secondary
Hisense Arena, the four-time
champion Roger Federer beat Blaz
Kavcic of Slovenia 6-2, 6-1, 7-6(4).
Away from the covered courts, the
American Sloane Stephens had her
match delayed by the four-hour heat
break, then interrupted by lightning
and rain that changed the
momentum of her second-round
match significantly. Stephens, who
reached the semifinals in Melbourne
last year, had won seven straight
games before play stopped because of
lightning and was delayed by rain.
When play resumed, her Croatian
opponent Ajla Tomljanovic won five
straight games to take a 5-3 lead in
the third set, before Stephens rallied
with four straight games of her own
to seal a roller coaster 3-6, 6-2, 7-5
victory.
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