Li Na
Li Na is a Chinese former professional tennis player. She was ranked world No. 2 in women's singles by the Women's Tennis Association. Li won nine WTA Tour-level singles titles, including two majors at the 2011 French Open and 2014 Australian Open. Those victories made her the first major singles champion born in Asia, male or female. She was also the runner-up at the 2011 Australian Open, 2013 Australian Open, and the 2013 WTA Tour Championships.
A trailblazer for tennis in China, Li was the first Chinese player to win a WTA Tour title at the Guangzhou International Women's Open in 2004, the first to reach a major singles quarterfinal at the 2006 Wimbledon Championships, the first to reach a major singles final, and the first to break into the world's top ten. By 2013, her accomplishments had made her the most successful Asian tennis player of her time, landing her on Time magazine's list of 100 Most Influential People in the World. Former world No. 1 Chris Evert wrote there: "Tennis has exploded in China. The country now has some 15 million tennis players; 116 million watched Li win the French Open. That kind of exposure is crucial to our sport, and it never would have happened without Li."
Li retired from tennis in September 2014, at age 32. In 2019, she was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, becoming the first Asian player to receive this honor.
Tennis career
At age six, Li followed her father's footsteps and started playing badminton, which honed her reflexes. Just before she turned eight, Li was persuaded to switch to tennis by coach Xia Xiyao of the Wuhan youth tennis club. Her instructors taught tennis through negative reinforcement, which affected Li's confidence in later years. Li joined China's National Tennis Team in 1997. The following year, Li, sponsored by Nike, went to John Newcombe Academy in Texas to study tennis. She studied there for ten months and returned to China. Growing up, her favourite tennis player was Andre Agassi. She turned professional in 1999 at the age of sixteen.At the end of 2002, Li left the national tennis team to study part-time at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, where she completed her bachelor's degree in journalism in 2009. The Chinese media cited various reasons for this. Some reported that the relationship between her and her teammate and future husband, Jiang Shan, was opposed by the national team's management, some reported that her coach, Yu Liqiao, was too strict and demanding, while other reports claimed that her request for a personal coach did not go through. However, some regarded that it was just the health problem leading to the retirement. The New York Times reported that one of the reasons was that a team leader wanted her to play through by taking hormone medicine as Li struggled with her performance due to hormone imbalance. She later told CNN that she had felt sick every day and didn't want her life to be only for tennis.
Li returned to the national team in 2004 to "give back" for their help during her earlier career. On January 27, 2006, Li married Jiang Shan who then became her personal coach. Li quit the national team as well as the state-run sports system in 2008 under an experimental reform policy for tennis players. This change was called "Fly Solo" by Chinese media. As a result, Li had the freedom to hire her own coaching staff and she would be solely responsible for the cost of training and coaching and tour expense. She could keep more of her winnings, with only twelve percent of her winnings going to the Chinese Tennis Association development fund as opposed to 65 percent previously. In the summer of 2012, the requirement of contribution to the Chinese tennis development fund was lifted and Li kept all her prize money.
On 5 June 2016, Li was commissioned by Special Olympics as a Global Ambassador.
1999–2002: Dominance on the ITF Circuit
Li turned professional in 1999, and won three of the first four singles tournaments she entered on the ITF Circuit, two at Shenzhen and one at Westende, Belgium. She also won all of her first seven ITF doubles tournaments she entered.In 2000, she won 52 singles matches on the ITF Circuit, more than any other player, notching another eight tournament titles, including one at the $50k level, two at $25k, and a run of four $10k tournament wins in March and April.
Notable individual victories in the course of the year included wins over Flavia Pennetta, Emmanuelle Gagliardi, Maria Elena Camerin, Tamarine Tanasugarn and Yayuk Basuki.
In June, after Li's world ranking had risen to No. 136 on the strength of her ITF performances alone, she gained direct entry into her first WTA Tour event at Tashkent. Despite winning the first set, Li lost her first WTA singles match to Anna Zaporozhanova in three sets, but she captured the women's doubles title at Tashkent with Li Ting against Zaporozhanova and Iroda Tulyaganova.
By the end of 2000, Li had won four WTA Tour singles matches, this brought her cumulative ITF singles title count up to eleven. That year, she also won seven more ITF doubles events, six of them with Li Ting.
Li was mostly absent from the tour in 2001. She further won two $25k singles tournaments, defeating Roberta Vinci in the final at Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Liu Nannan in the final at Guangzhou in July, but then played only one further match for the rest of the year, leading her ranking to fall to No. 303 by the year's close.
She won her 15th career ITF doubles tournament at Hangzhou in March.
In 2002, she came through qualifying to win her first $75k singles tournament at Midland, United States in February, defeating Laura Granville, Tatiana Perebiynis, and Mashona Washington en route to the title, the 14th of her career. But she then played only one more match, followed by a lengthy absence from the circuit for the next 25 months.
Sources vary as to the causes of this absence, the Chinese media mostly cited the conflict between her and the China's National Tennis Team's administration and coaching staff. Some claimed that she just wanted a break from professional tennis so she could concentrate on her studies at university.
2004–2005: Successful return to professional tennis
In May 2004, Li returned to competition after having not played since 2002. Although she was unranked, she won 26 successive matches to notch three further $25k tournament wins and another $50k title, increasing her career singles title count to 18, only to have her winning streak finally snapped by Evgenia Linetskaya in the semifinal of the $50k Bronx tournament that August. However, she won her 16th ITF doubles tournament at the same event, the 17th overall doubles title of her career.That September, she lost in the final of a $25k tournament to compatriot Zheng Jie, before returning to the WTA Tour, thanks to a wildcard entry into qualifying at Beijing. There, she defeated Antonella Serra Zanetti, Marta Domachowska, and Nicole Pratt before losing in the deciding-set tie-break after a very close second-round main-draw tussle against newly crowned US Open Champion Svetlana Kuznetsova, during which she held match points against Kuznetsova. The Russian afterwards praised her Chinese opponent, stating that she had felt as though she was up against a top-five player.
The very next week, Li battled her way through qualifying into the WTA Tour event at Guangzhou, then beat Vera Dushevina, Jelena Janković, Kristina Brandi, and Li Ting in the main draw to reach the final, where she overcame Martina Suchá to win her first WTA Tour title. By doing so, Li became the first Chinese player to win a WTA event.
On the back of the ranking points accrued through this result, on 4 October 2004, she broke into the WTA top 100 for the first time.
To cap off her most successful year as a singles player yet, she competed in two $50k tournaments at Shenzhen, winning the first outright to bring her the 19th ITF singles title and 20th overall singles title of her career, but losing in the quarterfinals of the second to lower-ranked country-woman Yan Zi. These results elevated Li Na to world No. 80 by the close of the year, a year in which she won 51 singles matches and lost just four.
2005 saw Li finally abandoning the ITF Circuit to focus solely on tour-level events. She began the year with a second-round performance at Gold Coast and a semifinal showing at Hobart, but losing to fellow Chinese player and eventual tournament champion Zheng Jie. She then made her Grand Slam debut at the 2005 Australian Open, advancing to the third round with wins over Laura Granville and Shinobu Asagoe before losing to Maria Sharapova. In early February, she reached the quarterfinals at Hyderabad and qualified for Doha where she was narrowly beaten by Patty Schnyder in the first round of the main draw. After a victory over Ai Sugiyama in the first round at Dubai the following week, it was Schnyder once again who stopped her from reaching the later stages of the event.
After taking a month off from competition, Li returned at Estoril in late April, defeating Stéphanie Cohen-Aloro, Nicole Pratt, Dally Randriantefy, and then crushing Dinara Safina to reach her second WTA Tour final. Li was denied the title by Czech qualifier Lucie Šafářová, who prevailed in a close three-set match. At Rabat in May, Li reached the semifinal stage, but further success ultimately proved elusive for her. With the score leveled at 3–3, she retired due to a right ankle sprain while clashing with Zheng Jie. Reaching this semifinal propelled her to a career-high singles ranking of world No. 33, but the injury she had sustained was destined to keep her out of action for the next three months. On her return at Los Angeles in August, she fell in the first round to Anna Chakvetadze of Russia. The following week, however, at the Canadian Open, she once more beat Jelena Janković and María Vento-Kabchi, before losing to Nadia Petrova in the third round.
It was Lindsay Davenport who proved her undoing in her next two tournaments, beating her in the first round of the US Open, and at the semifinal stage in Bali in September, but not before Li Na had avenged her previous year's defeat by Yan Zi in the second round of the same tournament. The following week, another highly ranked American player, Jill Craybas, narrowly defeated Li Na in a close three-set first-round match at Beijing. Li commenced her defense of her Guangzhou title; but she was prevented from completing it in the quarterfinals by eventual champion Yan Zi, who thereby edged out in front in their head-to-head record once again. This second loss in three head-to-heads against Yan proved to be Li's last match of 2005; and in her absence from the Shenzhen $50k tournaments where she had notched up some ranking points late the previous year, she found herself slipping further in the rankings from the high point of No. 33 that she had reached in the spring before her injury break, to No. 56 at the year's close.