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Paes, Bhupathi storm into French Open final

The dream run of Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi continued at the French Open, with the top seeded Indian making their second sucessive Grand Slam final.

In the semi-finals yesterday, Paes and Bhupathi defeated the Sweedish pair of Nicklas Kulti and Mikael Tillstrom 6-4, 6-3 to set up a title clash with the undseed pair of Goran Ivanisevic/Jeff Tarango.

The semi-final was a pretty straight forward affair, with Paes and Bhupathi quickly breaking Tillstrom in the third game for an early break, after which they didn't face any trouble in winning the set 6-4.

In the second set, Tillstrom was quickly broken again for a 1-0 lead, but the break was returned immediately as Paes was broken in the second game, on the second break chance at advantage out, after he fought off a 30-40 break attempt. Hereafter, the games went with serves till 3-3, when rain came down. After a delay of 55 minutes, the Indians returned to break Kulti at 30-40 in the seventh game. Paes and Bhupathi then cruised through, as Paes served off the next game on the third match point at 40-30.

Paes and Bhupathi got 3 of 5 break chances to their opponents, who got 1 of 2.

The win gives Paes and Bhupathi a total of 652 points, 1735 points this year, which makes them the No. 1 pair, ahead of the current No 1 Wayne Ferreira/Rick Leach (with over 1600 points).

It's rather interesting that despite being in the top10 for about two years, top five for over a year, and being No 2 or No 3 for most of the period, the "Indian Express" never reached No 1 in calendar-year ranking, though they have been a win away from reaching the top a couple of times in the past.

In a way, it's good that they have not been number 1 before. As No. 1, they would need to consistently reach Grand Slam summits and hopefully win too, unlike Rios, who became No. 1 in singles a while back, mostly on Super 9 points.

The quarter-final victory had already given the Indians the No. 1 and 2 individual rankings (about 500 and 400 points ahead of everybody); the semi-final win gave them their first No. 1 ranking as a team.

The prize-money for reaching the final is around $134,000. Though the prize-money at French Open has gone up a bit this year, it is effectively around the same or slightly less than last year, as the dollar has strengthened against the Franc.

Winning the final will give them a total of 876 points and about $265,000 to share. Another interesting thing is that out of the 1735 points they have, 1310 have come from the two Grand Glams, the Australian Open and the French Open. It proves that Leander and Mahesh do show up when it matters!