While the first Canadian Open semi-final mostly featured sunny weather, the second one never went ahead because of rain.
Rain has been playing dumb all week in Montreal, giving organizers all sorts of problems. It's not as bad as Rome earlier this year, but it's pretty close to that. Interestingly Elena Rybakina was the player most affected by rain in Rome, and she's enduring that this week as well.
The Kazakhstani player saw two of her matches start really late because of rain delays and the quarter-final against Kasatkina actually finished at 3 am local time. It was a terrible outcome for Elena Rybakina, who was set to play Liudmila Samsonova in the semi-final not even a full 24 hours later.
Luckily the rain intervened, giving her a few more hours of extra rest, however, it might end up backfiring because now she might need to play two matches in one day. Organizers held hope that the rain would stop keeping the players in limbo for hours but eventually called it off altogether.
The match will be played a few hours before the final is about to start which should give Jessica Pegula a huge advantage in theory. Whoever wins that Samsonova - Rybakina match will play a few hours after that, and that's far from ideal. You can't recover well, and that's only half of the problem.
Pegula would have had a full 24 hours before the match while her opponent wouldn't even have a full six hours but that's the life of a professional athlete. All of this is of course only theoretical because the weather needs to agree to the plan. Maybe it intervenes again as Rybakina was just that lucky.
She endured rain delays in Rome as well but ended up with the trophy. Will history repeat itself? We don't know. But it's going to be a packed final day in Montreal with two excellent matches coming up.
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