PARIS — Italy’s Sara Errani and Jasmine Paolini beat Mirra Andreeva and Diana Shnaider 2-6, 6-1, 10-7 in a match tiebreaker to win Olympic gold in the women’s doubles on Sunday.
It was Italy’s first tennis gold medal at any Summer Olympics.
Errani, 37, completed a career Golden Slam by adding her Olympics gold medal to her five Grand Slam doubles titles — at least one at each of the four major tournaments — which she accomplished with a different partner, Roberta Vinci.
The silver for Andreeva and Shnaider was the first medal for any Russian athlete at the 2024 Olympics — technically not representing their country, but competing as neutrals, because of the war on Ukraine.
Athletes from Russia and Belarus are competing at the Paris Games as Individual Neutral Athletes, known by the French acronym AIN. Those nations were banned by the International Olympic Committee from team sports at the Paris Games because of the attack on Ukraine that began in February 2022.
Individual athletes with Russian or Belarusian passports were allowed to compete as neutrals if they qualified and then were approved for entry to the Olympics.
“I’m not going to answer anything about politics here. … I’m here to talk about tennis,” Shnaider said at the post-match news conference, where both Russians wore plain white T-shirts.
The AIN athletes are not allowed to wear uniforms indicating which country they’re from, so Andreeva and Shnaider wore all-white outfits, with no flag or other markings related to Russia. Shnaider said her outfit in Paris is the one she used last month at Wimbledon, which has a policy mandating white clothing.
Andreeva was asked her thoughts on competing as part of the AIN group, instead of Russia.
“I have no way to answer this,” she said. “For me, honestly, it doesn’t matter. I just go out there, I play and I fight. And this week, we played and we fight together.”
On Friday, Ivan Litvinovich and Viyaleta Bardzilouskaya, both of Belarus, won the first medals by AIN athletes at the Paris Olympics, both in trampoline. Litvinovich claimed gold for the men, and Bardzilouskaya got the women’s silver. Yauheni Zalati, also from Belarus, won a silver in rowing on Saturday.
Andreeva is 17 and becomes the second-youngest player to claim a medal in Olympic tennis. Jennifer Capriati was 16 when she won the singles gold for the United States at Barcelona in 1992.
Combined with Lorenzo Musetti’s bronze in men’s singles on Saturday, the two medals are the first…
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