Victoria Azarenka produced a masterclass on centre court at the Italian Open to knock out third seed Sofia Kenin with a dominant 6-0, 6-0 victory in the second round on Thursday.
Azarenka, who lost the US Open final in New York on Saturday and flew in to Rome to beat Venus Williams in a two-hour first-round match on Wednesday, needed only an hour to dispatch the reigning Australian Open champion.
American Kenin, who received a bye into the second round, had no answers to Azarenka’s consistency from the baseline and made a string of errors, finishing the match with 22 unforced errors while Azarenka made only four.
Kenin did not create a single opportunity to break the 31-year-old Belarusian while Azarenka won an overwhelming 89% of her first serve points at the Foro Italico while converting six of 11 break points.
India's Rohan Bopanna and Canadian Denis Shapovalov stunned top seeds Juan Sebastian Cabal and Robert Farah of Colombia in a hard-fought second round encounter to enter the men's doubles quarterfinals of the Italian Open tennis tournament, in Rome, on Thursday.
The unseeded Indo-Canadian pair defeated their fancied rivals 6-3, 3-6, 10-5 in a round of 16 tie of the ATP Masters 1000 event.
Bopanna and Shapovalov will next face French combination of Jeremy Chardy and Fabrice Martin.
Bopanna and Shapovalov had defeated the pair of Argentina's Guido Pella and Chile's Cristian Garin 6-4, 6-4 to move into the round of 16.
The Indo-Canadian duo had bowed out of the men's doubles quarterfinals in the just-concluded US Open, losing 5-7, 5-7 to the pair of Jean-Julien Rojer of the Netherlands and Horia Tecau of Romania.