Japan fight to save Pan Pacific Open

TOKYO (AFP) – Organisers of Japan’s premier tennis tournament said Thursday they have not given up hope of remaining on the women’s world tour, despite being supplanted by a new event in China on the 2014 calendar.

The Women’s Tennis Association said on Wednesday that Wuhan, the home town of China’s former French Open champion Li Na, will replace Tokyo’s 30-year-old Pan Pacific Open as one of the tour’s high-ranking “Premier 5” events.

“The 2014 calendar is still at a draft level,” an official from the Pan Pacific Open secretariat told AFP.

“We are making arrangements with various parties concerned” to keep the event alive and on the list, possibly by overhauling its structure including the prize money, added the official, who asked not to be named.

Coupled with the inclusion of a lower-level “International” event in Hong Kong, China will host five of the 18 events in the Asia-Pacific in 2014.

Japan is tentatively due to host one just one “International” event that year, the Japan Women’s Open in Osaka. The 2013 Pan Pacific edition is scheduled for late September, the week before the China Open. It will have $2,369,000 in prize money.

The Pan Pacific Open was launched in 1984 as Asia’s first and biggest event on the world women’s tour. Its winners have included such big names as Martina Hingis, who won five times between 1997 and 2007, Martina Navratilova (1989, 1993), Steffi Graf (1986, 1990, 1994) and Maria Sharapova (2005, 2009).

A spokesman for Toray Industries, the Pan Pacific’s title sponsor, said he was not aware of any economic factor leading to the exclusion of the event from the 2014 list.