Tennis: Seles out US Open

MONICA SELES, sidelined since she was stabbed by a fan during a tournament in Hamburg on 30 April, will be unable to defend her US Open title, according to her doctors.

'She is not ready to return to competitive tennis,' her doctors, Richard Steadman and Richard Hawkins, said in a statement yesterday. 'There is still no way to accurately predict when she will be able to return to daily competition.'

Seles was the world's top-ranked women's player when she was stabbed during the tournament in Germany. The assailant, an East German who was formally charged with wounding yesterday, said he was a Steffi Graf fan who wanted to knock Seles from the No 1 ranking. Since then, Graf has taken over that ranking, winning the French Open and Wimbledon.

Seles, who won the US Open Championship in 1991 as well as last year, had been undergoing rehabilitation in Vail, Colorado, since she was assaulted.