Wawrinka will reappear in Marbella after more than a year injured

Marbella (Málaga), 21 Mar The Swiss tennis player Stan Wawrinka, winner of three Grand Slam tournaments, will return after just over a year of withdrawal from competition at the Andalusian Open, which will be held from March 27 to April 3 at the Puente Romano club in Marbella, its organizers announced this Monday. A serious injury to his left foot led the 36-year-old Swiss, world number three in 2014, to undergo surgery twice and has kept him off the slopes since March 8, 2021, when he lost in the first round of the Doha (Qatar) tournament to South African Lloyd Harris. Wawrinka, who spent three consecutive years in the top four in the world ranking between 2014 and 2016, has sixteen ATP titles and an Olympic gold in the men's doubles category that he won in Beijing 2008 alongside fellow countryman Roger Federer. In his almost twenty years of professional career, he has achieved more than 500 victories and is the only player to beat the “Big 4” (Djokovic, Nadal, Federer and Murray) both in Grand Slam and on clay, his favorite surface and on which the 'AnyTech365 Andalucía Open 2022' will be played, the organization highlighted in its presentation. Among the surprises of this ATP Challenger 250 tournament, which he has joined as director to replace the late Ronnie Leitgeb his son Florian, is the celebration for the first time this year of a women's WTA 125 in which sixteen tennis players who are among the top hundred in the world have already confirmed their attendance. Among them are Belgian Alison Van Uytvanck, number 55 on the WTA list and seeded in the Marbella tournament; Dutch Arantxa Rus, who is ranked 63rd; Egyptian Mayar Sherif, number 67; and Ukrainian nationalized Belgian Maryna Zanevska, ranked 68th in the world rankings. They are joined by France's Kristina Mladenovic, winner of five Grand Slams in the doubles mode and who was in the world 'top-10'; Croatian Donna Vekic, who reached number 19 in 2019 and has three WTA titles; the same amount as Slovakia's Anna Karolina Schmiedlova, who also entered the twenty-six players confirmed. The presentation of the tournament recalled the figure of Ronnie Leitgeb, who died suddenly at 62 last February and whose president of the Royal Spanish Tennis Federation, Miguel Díaz, stressed that he was the “alma mater” of this competition. Regarding Leitgeb's announced intention to transfer his license from the Lyon tournament to Marbella with a view to 2023, his son Florian, the new director of the Andalusian Open, commented that it is something that will be seen, as we have to go “step by step”, as well as thanking the sponsors and authorities for the support of the sponsors and authorities. Along with the president of the Spanish Tennis Federation and the director of the tournament, the presentation was attended by the founder and first executive of AnyTech365, Janus Nielsen; the Secretary General for Sports of the Junta de Andalucía, José María Arrabal; the Councilor for Sports of Marbella, Manuel Cardeña and the director of Puente Romano Beach Resort, Gonzalo Rodriguez. CHIEF 1011973 eg/mdr/cc/arh