Pierce, Seles win

After eight months away from clay, Seles didn’t start practicing on the surface until Monday and the effects of the lay-off showed in the first set against Smashnova. But the nine-time grand slam champion took control of the match by winning all the points in the tiebreaker, then needed just 16 minutes to finish off her opponent in the following set.

Pierce, who has won only one tournament in the last 16 months, is hoping to get back on form with her older brother, David, serving as her new coach. He replaced Michael Dejongh after the Australian open.

In other action, unseeded Patty Schnyder of Switzerland scored the day’s biggest upset with a 7-6 (7-4), 7-6 (7-0) victory over fifth seed Sandrine Testud of France. Testud rallied from a 5-1 deficit in the second set to take a 6-5 lead, but Schnyder recovered to post her first win over a top-10 ranked player since defeating France’s Amelie Mauresmo in the second round of the Australian open.

Other seeds advancing to the third round included sixth seed Spain’s Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario, tenth seed South Africa’s Amanda Coetzer and fifteenth seed American Chanda Rubin. Russia’s Anna Kournikova, the no. 7 seed, who is still looking for her first WTA singles title, advanced earlier and will face unseeded Nicole Pratt of Austria tonight in a third-round match.

Stoltenberg upsets Larsson

ATLANTA: Jason Stoltenberg, playing his first tournament since the Australian Open, upset third-seeded Magnus Larsson 3-6, 6-4, 6-4, and Nicolas Massu reached his first ATP tour quarter-final with 6-2, 6-3 victory over sixth-seeded Sargis Sargsian at the Atlanta Tennis Challenge on Wednesday.

Stoltenberg has been one of the most successful players in this tournament’s history. He lost to Marcelo Filippini and Pete Sampras in past finals. Last year, it was Stoltenberg, as the second seed, who was upset by Larsson, just coming back from a wrist injury, 6-2, 6-2 in the quarter-finals.

Massu, ranked no. 90, had a fairly easy time with Sargsian, never losing serve. At 20, Massu is the sixth-youngest player in the top 100. This is only his 10th ATP tour event.

In other matches yesterday, fifth seed Chris Woodruff and seventh seed Jeff Tarango won in the first round while second seed Stefan Koubek and eighth Andrew Ilie reached the quarters.

Medvedev beat Costa

ESTORIL: Andrei Medvedev took a step towards finding the confidence he lost at last year’s French Open, upsetting fifth-seeded holder Albert Costa 2-6, 6-3, 6-4 for a first-round victory on Wednesday, at the 765,000-dollar Estoril Open.

Medvedev will play for a quarter-final spot against Austrian Markus Hipfl. The Ukrainian owns 11 career titles, with the majority of them won at the beginning and middle of the 1990s when he was a teenaged talent on the rise.

Third seed Nicolas Lapentti of Ecuador advanced over Croatian Ivan Ljubicic 6-4, 6-3 to set up a second-round date with Australian Richard Fromberg.

Memories of last week’s Davis Cup riot in Chile preyed on the mind of Argentine Mariano Zabaleta, meanwhile, during his first-round loss. The sixth seed was beaten 6-3, 6-4 by 20-year-old Spaniard Juan Carlos Ferrero.

In the women’s competition, second seed Nathalie Dechy of France defeated Laurence Courtois of Belgium 7-6 (7-5), 7-5. She followed the example of top seeded German Anke Huber, who pulled out of a second-set slump against 15-year-old Russian Lina Krasnoroutskaya for a 6-1, 1-6, 7-6 (7/4) first-round win.

Serena pull out

HILTON HEAD ISLAND (USA): Serena Williams, who pulled out of a match on Tuesday with a sore left knee, has pulled out of the WTA Circle Cup to protest a Confederate flag flying over the state capital building.

The US Open champion was unhappy with the state legislature’s decision to keep flying the flag of the former slave-holding confederacy, a racial insult to Williams and other black Americans.

The move supports a boycott of events in this state called by the NAACP black advocacy group.

The 18-year-old Williams was made aware of the Confederate flag during an event at Indian Wells, California, last month and said at the time that she would consider pulling out of the clay-court event.

Williams would have been seeded third behind world number one Lindsay Davenport, a white fellow American, and France’s Mary Pierce at next week’s event and it would have marked her debut here after withdrawing last year due to a right knee injury.