There will be no mixed doubles consolation for Serena Williams. After her shocking first-round upset by Virginie Razzano in the first round of Roland Garros in singles, Serena was sent packing in Paris after a defeat in the first round of mixed doubles. Serena and Bob Bryan lost to Gisela Dulko and Eduardo Schwank of Argentina 7-5 3-6 10-6.

Bob Bryan is current world No.3 in ATP doubles rankings, and was for a long time No.1 doubles player. Also, he's won 78 career titles in doubles and was runner-up in doubles 42 times. Serena herself entered the 2012 Roland Garros match boasting a 19-3 record in five mixed doubles at Grand Slams, which included two titles and two finals. Read more »

The French Open is in full swing, but in the back of our minds we're already thinking about the approaching Wimbledon, and so are the tennis fashion designers. The Nike-clad world No.1 and No.2 will both wear white dresses with contrasting necklines in vibrant blue/lime.

Victoria Azarenka's departure from shorts will continue. The Belarusian will stick with Nike Women's Tie Breaker Knit Dress that she's working at Roland Garros, only the London version, in white. Read more »

Longtime reader Brenda showed me the new Adidas dress that Ana Ivanovic is expected to wear at Wimbledon 2012.

The clothing item is called Adidas Women's Lawn Adizero Dress and comes in white with an infrared line cruising from back to front. The top of the dress is asymmetrical on both sides.

Read more »

Reader Darragh Egan sent me images of Maria Sharapova's and Serena Williams' probable future dresses.

For the French Open Nike dedicated this olive and black Maria Statement Set Dress to Sharapova. As for Serena, the Statement Rally Dress she is expected to wear is all green, in three shades of the color. Read more »

Our stats analyst Omair is already famous for his statistical articles and now he's inspired Ludolf, another reader of Women's Tennis Blog and fan of tennis numbers, to contribute his take on the WTA rankings, i.e. he compared the actual rankings with the performance of players at the biggest events – Grand Slams and WTA Championships. Enjoy!

The WTA ranking does not rank properly the strength of players in the sense of the ability to win a match or a tournament. The main reason is that it is cumulative and therefore underestimates players without a sufficient number of tournaments. We need to compute an average to avoid this. Moreover, the WTA ranking considers tournaments with weights not depending on the quality of players on them.

To achive the above-mentioned goal it seems to be more appropriate to take the average result from majors and the WTA Championships, the tournaments where the best players are almost always present. By the result of a player we mean the number of her losses (including the rounds which she did not achieve), i.e. 0 for the winner, 1 for the defeated finalist, 2 for defeated semifinalists, and so on. The results for the last 52 weeks are presented in the table, completed by the WTA ranking (after the Australian Open) for comparison. (FO: French Open, W: Wimbledon, USO: US Open, WTA: WTA Championships, AO: Australian Open)

Read more »