The US Open may be over and the champion of the last Grand Slam of the year may have been crowned, but there’s still plenty of tennis to be played in the season and before the WTA Tour moves on to Asia for the build-up to the season-ending champions in Singapore and Zhuhai, there’s one last tournament to be played in North America – the Coupe Banque Nationale in Quebec City.
Played on the other side of the US Open from the Premier-level and prestigious Rogers Cup in Montreal or Toronto, WTA Quebec City is a more intimate affair. An International-level event featuring a 28-player singles draw, the Coupe Banque Nationale is one of the few remaining WTA Tour events played on carpet and takes place at the 30,000-capacity Universite Laval-PEPS venue in the capital of the Canadian province of Quebec.
The Coupe Banque Nationale was first played in 1993, when third seed Nathalie Tauziat took the title – and played a small but significant role in tennis history, when future legend of the game Serena Williams played her first WTA Tour match as a professional at WTA Quebec City in 1995, losing in the first round of qualifying. Serena, then 14 years old, earned $240 and one ranking point for her 1-6, 1-6 defeat!
Over the following years, a number of well-known WTA Tour stars and future stars captured the title at the Coupe Banque Nationale, including Katerina Maleeva (1994), Jennifer Capriati (1999), Maria Sharapova (2003), Marion Bartoli (2006) and Lindsay Davenport (2007). The WTA Quebec City tournament was also honoured as the WTA’s International Tournament of the Year no fewer than eight times – a record – including every year from 1995 to 2000.
In recent years a number of WTA Tour players have shone at the Coupe Banque Nationale, which has never been won more than twice by any player. Czech stars Barbora Strycova (2011) and Lucie Safarova (2013) have claimed the title as well as Belgian’s Kirsten Flipkens (2012). In 2014, seven-time Grand Slam champion Venus Williams made a popular return to the tournament but although she reached the final, she was defeated by Mirjana Lucic-Baroni. Lucic-Baroni, a former teenage phenomenon driven away from the sport by an abusive parent and injuries, had struggled for years to make it back to the sport and her WTA Quebec City title set a new record for the longest gap between titles on the WTA Tour – 16 years and four months, breaking the previous record held by Kimiko Date-Krumm.
Annika Beck, Oceane Dodin and Alison van Uytvanck followed Lucic-Baroni in becoming Coupe Banque Nationale champions in recent years, with 2017 French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko featuring in the 2015 final.