Sonay Cartal’s eye-catching run at Indian Wells was suddenly stopped Wednesday by Alina Sabalenka.
Britt entered the main draw as a “lucky loser” but took it all the way through to California’s fourth round, beating 16-seeded Beatrice Haddad Maia.
For a while, Cartal seemed to have the potential to cause another stunning upset as he defeated the winner of three Grand Slams in the first game. An early retreat led Sabalenka to be blamed for being audible indecent and thus subjected to a prompt code violation.
However, Sabalenka quickly reorganized to blow away the Cartal. Brit had no answer to the quality of the show from his opponents across the court as Sabalenka won all six games to win a set lead.
Sabalenka refuses to resign from the second set, forcing Kartal to sprint around the court in vain attempts to withstand the barrage of barrage.
Kartal showed some improvement by stealing two games from Sabalenka in serve, but her rebellion delayed the inevitable as the tournament’s top seed rounded out the victory in just over an hour.
The intense Belarusian who helped fix a small problem on the net in the first set faces either Lyudmila Samsonova or Jasmine Paolini in the quarterfinals.