Amelie Mauresmo capped a perfect day for seeded players with a 6-0, 7-5 victory over Olga Savchuk in the first round of the Bausch & Lomb Championships on Monday night.
After Mauresmo breezed through the opening set, Savchuk failed to deliver on two set points serving with a 5-4 edge in the second, then foot faulted on a break point to even the set at five-all.
Mauresmo regained control of the match and took the next two games for a satisfying straight-set win in her first match on clay this year.
“I was pretty happy to come back from 5-4 to five-all because going into a third set is never easy,” said Mauresmo, the 2001 Bausch & Lomb champion, whose recent rankings slide has her seeded 11th this year.
Other seeded winners on Monday included No. 9 Sybille Bammer, No. 13 Virginie Razzano and No. 15 Anabel Medina Garrigues.
No. 1 seed Maria Sharapova and the rest of the top eight seeds received byes into the second round.
Anna Chakvetadze, Daniela Hantuchova, Marion Bartoli and Patty Schnyder round out the top five in the field, which also includes three-time tournament champion Lindsay Davenport (No. 16).
The event lost luster recently when Venus Williams, Elena Dementieva, Nicole Vaidisova, Nadia Petrova and defending champion Tatiana Golovin withdrew.
Davenport will play her first-round match against US wild card Vania King during the day. Sharapova starts at night against Czech qualifier Barbora Zahlavova Strycova, who defeated Timea Bacsinszky 6-2, 6-4 on Monday.
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