Gauff building momentum in Wuhan, US Open finalist Pegula out

WUHAN, China (AP) — Coco Gauff advanced to the quarterfinals of the Wuhan Open with a 6-4, 6-1 rout of 17th-ranked Marta Kostyuk in just over an hour on Thursday.

It was the fourth-ranked Gauff's eighth consecutive win on the WTA Tour's Asian swing after the American won the China Open last week which moved her back into the top five in the rankings.

Gauff fired two aces and broke the Ukrainian's serve five times — for the loss of one of her own — as she clinched a one-sided match and extended her lead in their head-to-head series to 3-1.

“I’m really happy with how I played today,” Gauff said. “It was a pretty straightforward match. Marta and I always have some good battles. Today I was able to get through in straight sets.”

Next for Gauff is No. 45-ranked Magda Linette, who continued her impressive form this week by beating eighth-seeded Daria Kasatkina 6-2, 6-3.

“Yeah, so she’s a tough opponent,” Gauff said of Linette. "We haven’t played since (the U.S. Open in 2021). I really don’t know what to expect. But just from watching her play, she’s been playing a great couple of matches here in Wuhan.

"I expect it to be a tough match. She’s not an easy opponent to play."

Gauff will be the only American left in the draw after third-ranked Jessica Pegula and tour rookie Hailey Baptiste both lost.

Pegula, the U.S. Open finalist, had a tough afternoon against the 51st-ranked Wang Xinyu of China, who was dominant on serve throughout and clinched a 6-3, 7-5 win to make her first WTA 1000 quarterfinal.

Wang had won their only previous meeting in three sets in the second round at Wimbledon earlier this year and got off to a fast start here by breaking Pegula twice in the opening set to take the lead.

After her first win over a top 10 player in the previous round, Baptiste was routed 6-1, 6-1 by Ekaterina Alexandrova.

The 22-year-old American was broken six times by the No. 33-ranked Russian who clinched her quarterfinal berth against Wang in 63 minutes

Later, second-ranked Aryna Sabalenka looked to maintain her undefeated record at the Wuhan Open when she plays Yulia Putintseva of Kazakhstan in her third-round match.

A win for the Belarussian will allow her to regain top spot in the rankings from Iga Swiatek, who is absent form the women's tour Asian swing citing personal reasons and fatigue.

Sabalenka, the reigning U.S. Open champion, is 13-0 in Wuhan after winning the title on her first appearance in 2018 and defending her crown in 2019 before the tournament took a five-year hiatus from the calendar due to COVID-19 travel restrictions.

AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis

Coco Gauff of the United States kisses the trophy after defeating Karolina Muchova of Czech Republic in the women's singles final match at the China Open tennis tournament at the National Tennis Center in Beijing, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim)

STOCKHOLM (AP) — After three days of Nobel prizes honoring work in the sciences, the literature award is being announced Thursday by the Nobel Committee at the Swedish Academy.

The winner will follow Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who was honored last year for writing in Nynorsk, one of the two official written versions of the Norwegian language, that prize organizers said gives “voice to the unsayable.”

The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It has also been male-dominated, with just 17 women among its 119 laureates. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.

Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize on Tuesday. On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.

FILE - A Nobel Prize medal is displayed before a ceremony at the Swedish Ambassador's Residence in London, Monday, Dec. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

FILE - A close-up view of a Nobel Prize medal at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md., Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

The Nobel Prize in literature is being awarded in Stockholm

FILE - A bust of Alfred Nobel on display following a press conference at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday, Oct. 3, 2022. (Henrik Montgomery/TT News Agency via AP, File)

The Nobel Prize in literature is being awarded in Stockholm