Business & Finance Club - Tokyo: Former top 10 player Radek Stepanek became the first man to reach the Japan Open quarter-finals after beating Switzerland's Marco Chiudinelli yesterday.

The Czech won 5-7, 7-6, 4-1 after his opponent retired with a back injury having already had a lengthy rubdown from the trainer on Tokyo's centre court.

Chiudinelli, who won their only previous meeting in August, took the first set in glorious autumn sunshine before calling for a medical timeout after tweaking his back.

Spread-eagled face-down and shirtless, the Swiss received a massage which appeared to do have done the trick until he coughed up the set with an ill-timed double-fault in the tiebreak.

The third set was one-way traffic and Chiudinelli threw in the towel to spare himself further injury on the quick hardcourts.

World No 1 Rafael Nadal was given the day off after safely coming through his opening match on what many players have described as the world's fastest tennis court.

Finn Jarkko Nieminen, first-round conqueror of defending champion Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and a finalist at the Thailand Open last week, was to play Spain's Daniel Gimeno-Traver later yesterday.

Former Tokyo runner-up Richard Gasquet faces Russia's Dmitry Tursunov while Bangkok winner Guillermo Garcia-Lopez faces fellow Spaniard Feliciano Lopez, the tournament's sixth seed.

Federer's future

Meanwhile, Nadal insists his great rival Roger Federer is no spent force and backed him to add to his record haul of 16 grand slam titles.

"He won at the Australian Open and won in Cincinnati (Federer's 17th Masters 1000 title) so it's a good year for him," Nadal told reporters at this week's Japan Open.

"It's very difficult to always be 100 per cent and what Federer did the last seven or eight years is almost impossible to repeat. It's unbelievable."

Nadal matched Federer in winning all four grand slam crowns by winning last month's US Open to move to nine overall and add to the Wimbledon and French Open crowns he won earlier in the year. But the Spaniard warned that it was far too early to write off Federer, who has won 63 career titles but has slipped to third in the world rankings.

"Of course, he is going to challenge to win the big tournaments," said Nadal. "His game is still at a very high level."

RESULTS

China Open:

Third round (prefix denotes seeding): Timea Bacsinszky (Switzerland) beat Elena Vesnina (Russia) 6-2 6-3; 15-Shahar Peer (Israel) beat Bojana Jovanovski (Serbia) 6-1 6-2.

Second round: Angelique Kerber (Germany) beat Alexandra Dulgheru (Romania) 6-2 6-1.