Windy city blown over as Hingis makes home run

Carlos Moya and Alex Corretja were sitting on their chairs when history was made. The Arthur Ashe stadium exploded with spontaneous applause and the huge electronic scoreboard blazed the news. Mark McGwire had hit his 62nd home run of the season.

America has been transfixed by McGwire's race with Sammy Sosa to break Roger Maris's 37-year-old baseball record for the most home runs in a season, with the US Open tennis no more than an afterthought for much of the past 10 days.

By the time the Moya-Corretja fourth-round match had finished on an extremely windy and cool evening, only a few hundred brave souls remained - the rest having gone to drink a toast to McGwire. Corretja was philosophical. "If I had been a spectator, I would have left too. It was not a good match."

It was a repeat of the French Open final and once again Moya beat his fellow Spaniard in straight sets, 7-6, 7-5, 6-3. Today he plays the unseeded Swede Magnus Larsson for a place in Saturday's semi-finals.

The swirling wind has been a major problem for all the players this week. Certainly Monica Seles was unhappy with the conditions, whereas Martina Hingis, the reigning champion, appeared to thrive among the draughts and gusts, beating Seles 6-4, 6-4 for a semi-final place against Jana Novotna, who took her Wimbledon title this year.

This has been a difficult year for Hingis. It began well when she defended her Australian Open crown in Melbourne for her fourth Grand Slam win. But thereafter the struggles began, with the 17-year-old Swiss woman never looking entirely at ease.

She admitted this week that her body had changed in the past six months and she was not able to chase down shots as easily as before. Those close to her revealed that after losing in the semi-final to Novotna at Wimbledon she returned home and worked doubly hard on her fitness, although others suggested it was the mental edge she had lost.

News filtered through early in these championships that she had split up from her Spanish boyfriend Julian Alonso, and there was no doubt that she was fired up for her quarter-final against Seles, who had won their previous two encounters - notably in the semi-finals at Roland Garros, thus shelving Hingis's ambition of winning the French Open, the only Grand Slam to elude the teenager so far.

Seles generally hits the ball flat, and in the opening games had Hingis scurrying around the baseline, but such shots were increasingly difficult to execute in the wind, whereas Hingis was able to hold the ball up with top spin. In all Seles made 26 unforced errors.

"There were times when it was almost impossible to control the ball," said the 1991 and 1992 title-holder. "I felt lost this entire tournament."