By: Lynn Pence, EBC Sports International, Washington DC Bureau
WASHINGTON D.C. (Eagle News) – The Puerto Rican dynamite is not a fresh face in the world of tennis.
Monica Puig was born on September 27, 1993 in Puerto Rico and entered the tennis scene in 2007 for her very first match at the Prince Cup. She currently ranks number 69 in the world and has won one singles title during the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) tour and six titles for the International Tennis Federation (ITF) circuit in her career.
Her first WTA title came when she was ranked no. 41 in the world, defeating Silvia Soler Espinosa in Strasbourg in May of 2014. That same year, she also won the gold medal at the Central American and Caribbean Games in Mexico where she represented Puerto Rico. In 2016, Puig also competed in the 2016 Rio Olympics and became the first Latin American player to win gold for the women’s singles tournament. She will go down in history as the only unseeded female player to win gold since the return of tennis to the Olympic Games in 1988, after being left out since the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris.
Puig will be competing in this year’s 2017 Citi Open tournament hosted by Washington, D.C. Being the 2016 Olympics gold medalist and 2014 WTA champion, Puig will continue her campaign to be the best of the best here at the 2017 Citi Open. Surely, great things are expected from this star athlete!
(Eagle News Service)