Swiss Pair Sweep Chennai Doubles Crown as Rain and Diwali Smoke Push Singles Final to Monday

The Chennai Open ended its final day with a trophy presentation and an apology, in that order. The doubles champions were crowned in the afternoon sun. The singles finalists were sent home to wait until Monday.

Naïma Karamoko and Simona Waltert of Switzerland won the doubles title with a performance that barely gave the home crowd time to settle. They beat India's Vaishnavi Adkar and Rutuja Bhosale 6-2, 6-0 at the SDAT Tennis Stadium, breaking early in both sets and never letting the match breathe. Karamoko, ranked 99th in the world in doubles, was the sharper of the two at the net, picking off returns and cutting the angles down until the Indian pair had nowhere left to hit. Waltert held the baseline steady behind her, and the whole thing was over before it had really begun.

It was the first WTA doubles title for the Swiss pair, and there was nothing fluky about it: two sets, eight games lost between them, and a trophy that will follow them to every tournament they play from here on.

For Adkar and Bhosale, the defeat stung, but it could not take away what the week had already given them. They arrived in Chennai as wildcards of a sort and left as the first all-Indian pair ever to reach a doubles final at WTA Tour level, a line that will sit in the record books long after the score of this final is forgotten. They had earned their place with a comeback win over the second seeds, Weronika Falkowska and Alana Smith, 6-2, 2-6, 10-8 in Saturday's semi-final.

Then the day took its stranger turn. The singles final, top seed and defending champion Janice Tjen of Indonesia against third seed Magda Linette of Poland, was supposed to follow the doubles. It never started. Rain had been coming and going all day, and by the time the doubles trophy was lifted, smoke from Diwali fireworks had settled thick over the stadium, the air heavy enough that the organisers could not in good conscience send two players out to chase a title in it. The match was pushed back a day, to Monday at 11 a.m. local time. Scheduling a final on Diwali, when fireworks fill the city's skies as a matter of tradition, drew criticism from the moment the calendar was published, and Sunday proved the critics right. Firecrackers had been popping around the venue since the semi-finals, and in a sport where silence is observed between points, the constant bursting outside the walls was more than a distraction.

Tjen, who won this title a year ago and reached her second straight final by beating Robin Montgomery 6-3, 6-4 on Saturday, had spoken before the final about keeping her plans simple. "Recovery is the first priority," she said. "We'll see tomorrow if we have some time to celebrate." She will get an extra day of recovery now, whether she wanted it or not. Linette, who fought back from a set down to beat Anastasia Zakharova 2-6, 6-2, 6-3 in her semi-final, was runner-up in Chennai in 2022 and has waited four years for another crack at this title. She will wait one more night.

There is a poignancy to the delay that goes beyond the weather. This is the last edition of the Chennai Open in its current home, with the tournament's licence expected to move to Manila in 2027. Sunday was supposed to be a farewell. Instead the farewell has been stretched into Monday morning, and Chennai's last champion will be crowned a day late, in air that should finally be clear.