Issue link: http://itf.uberflip.com/i/916935
WINTER 2017 WELCOME 2 ITFWORLD WINTER 2017 W elcome to the Winter issue of ITFWorld magazine. The sheer number of events covered in this edition gives you some idea of how busy the closing months of the season were for the ITF across every area of the sport. Since I last wrote to you in this magazine, we have held the Junior Davis Cup and Fed Cup by BNP Paribas Finals in Hungary, and the ITF Junior Masters, which I attended in Chengdu. Florida hosted both the ITF Seniors World Team and Individual Championships, and the ITF Super-Seniors World Team and Individual Championships. We had a very successful staging of the biennial Worldwide Coaches Conference by BNP Paribas, for which I travelled to Sofia. In wheelchair tennis, there was the UNIQLO Wheelchair Tennis Doubles Masters and NEC Wheelchair Tennis Masters, held in Bemmel, Netherlands and Loughborough, United Kingdom respectively. The end-of-season Masters singles titles were won by Diede de Groot, Alfie Hewett and David Wagner. All three were also Masters doubles champions: de Groot with Marjolein Buis, Hewett with Gordon Reid, and Wagner with Nick Taylor. Congratulations to them all, and to all the winners of our junior and seniors events. The finals of Fed Cup by BNP Paribas and Davis Cup by BNP Paribas were both high-octane events with huge passionate and engaged crowds, whose winners continued the throwback feel which has been a theme of much of the 2017 tennis season. USA was crowned Fed Cup champion nation for a staggering 18th time, extending its own record in the women's team event, but capturing its first title for 17 years. Congratulations to the Americans and to France, which ended its 16-year wait in an emotional final to lift the Davis Cup trophy for the tenth time. My thanks go to the Belarus Tennis Federation, which staged a superb Fed Cup by BNP Paribas final in Minsk, attended by more than 8,800 fans daily. The Belarusians fought bravely to the end to secure an historic first victory but this was to be USA's year, with CoCo Vandeweghe winning a record eight matches during their campaign. The French Tennis Federation did a wonderful job in hosting a second Davis Cup by BNP Paribas final in three years in Lille, and the atmosphere was electric with nearly 26,000 fans packed inside the Stade Pierre Mauroy every day. France was a worthy winner but Belgium had its chances, led by ATP Finals runner-up David Goffin, and buoyed by thousands of travelling Belgian fans. With competition finished for the season, one of the ITF's most exciting announcements is our annual ITF World Champions. We were delighted to announce the 2017 winners as Rafael Nadal, Garbine Muguruza, Chan Yung-Jan and Martina Hingis, Lukasz Kubot and Marcelo Melo, Whitney Osuigwe, Axel Geller, Yui Kamiji, Gustavo Fernandez and David Wagner. You can read more about their outstanding seasons within these pages. The ITF is proud to announce a newly-created quad World Champion category this year, with the indomitable Wagner a truly deserving inaugural recipient. A STRONG FINISH ITF President David Haggerty presents CoCo Vandeweghe with her Fed Cup trophy