Review
The tournament was won by Dinara Safina, who started the tournament as the thirteenth seed. She enjoyed the best week of her career to win her first ever Tier I title. In the third round, she beat top seed Justine Henin in a match that turned out to be the last before she retired, her second victory over a world number one, and followed it up by stopping Serena Williams's 17-match winning streak. She defeated Elena Dementieva (who had defeated defending champion Ivanovic in the semi-finals) in the final, in the 14th all-Russian final on the WTA Tour, and the third of five in the 2008 season (Dementieva would go on to beat Safina in the final of the Olympics).
Ana Ivanovic was the only top six seed to reach the semifinals in a tournament littered with upsets. Henin and Williams lost the aforementioned matches to Safina, third seed Svetlana Kuznetsova lost to Alyona Bondarenko, Jelena Janković lost to Elena Dementieva and Anna Chakvetadze went down in her first match to Victoria Azarenka, who eventually made her first ever Tier I semifinal. Ivanovic, for her part, was defeated in the semi-finals by Elena Dementieva; the defeat dropped her to World No. 3 behind Henin and Maria Sharapova at the conclusion of the tournament.
World number ones Cara Black and Liezel Huber won the doubles title, beating the unseeded Spanish pairing Nuria Llagostera Vives and María José Martínez Sánchez, who had upset number two seeds Květa Peschke and Rennae Stubbs in a thrilling match tiebreak in the semifinals, which ended at 16–14.
Read more about this topic: 2008 Qatar Telecom German Open
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