Li Na (tennis)
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Li Na (: 李娜; : Lǐ Nà; born February 26, 1982) is a professional player. As of September 2013, Li has won 7 and 19 singles titles. Li rose to prominence after she won the singles title, making her the first and only singles champion from an Asian country. Prior to this Li had already become the first player representing an Asian country to appear in a Grand Slam singles final, a milestone she achieved at the. She was also the runner-up at the , three times a quarter-finalist at and a semi-finalist at the . Her career-high singles ranking is World No. 3 (achieved on October 28, 2013) and is currently the World No. 3 and Chinese No. 1 (out of 4 in the top-100). Personal life[]
professional player and later worked as a sales rep for a Wuhan based company. He died from a rare cardiovascular disease when Li Na was 14.
At age six, Li Na started playing badminton, following her father's footsteps. Just before she turned eight, Li made the transition from badminton to tennis when she and her parents were convinced by co
ach Xia Xiyao of the Wuhan youth tennis club that this would be the right career move for her. Li joined China's National Tennis Team in 1997. In the following year, Li, sponsored by , went to John Newcombe Academy in Texas to study tennis. She studied there for 10 months and returned to China. Li turned professional in 1999 at age sixteen.
At the end of 2002, Li left the national tennis team to study part-time at , 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, future husband Jiang Shan (姜山), was opposed by the national team's management, some reported that her coach Yu Liqiao (余丽桥) was too strict and demanding,while other reports claimed that her request for a personal coach did not go through.
11.14是什么情人节However, Li returned to the national team in 2004. Jiang Shan married Li on January 27, 2006 and 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 Alone" (单飞) by Chinese media. As a result, Li had the freedom to pick her own coaching staff but she would be responsible for the cost of travel, training and coaching. She could keep more of her winnings, with only 8 to 12 percent of her winnings go to the as opposed to 65 percent previously.
Li Na has a on her chest, and hid it for many years since tattoos are not widely accepted in China, especially on women.
Career summary[]
抽屉滑道1999–2002: Dominance on the ITF Circuit[]
Li turned professional in 1999, and that year won three of the very first four singles tournaments she entered on the ITF Circuit, two at and one at , Belgium. She also won all of her first seven ITF doubles tournaments she entered.
In 2000, she won a total of 52 singles matches on the ITF circuit, more than any other player, notching another eight tournament titles including one at $50,000 level, two at $25,000, and an unbroken run of four successive $10,000 tournament wins in March and April.
Notable individual victories in the course of the year included wins over , , , and .
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 event at . Despite winning the first set, Li lost her first WTA singles match to in three sets, but she captured the women's doubles title at Tashkent with against
Zaporozhanova and .
By the end of 2000, Li had won four WTA singles matches, this brought her cumulative ITF singles title count up to 11. That year, she also won seven more ITF doubles events, 6 of them with .
Li was mostly absent from the tour in 2001. She won two further $25,000 ITF singles tournaments, defeating in the final at , Vietnam, and 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.
小包总杨烁She won her 15th career ITF doubles tournament at Hangzhou in March.
In 2002, she came through qualifying to win her first $75,000 singles tournament at Midland, USA in February, defeating , , and en route to the title, the 14th of her career. But she then played only one more match (a loss to in the $50,000 event at Dinan, France that April), 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: Successful return to professional tennis[]
In May 2004, Li returned to the competition after having not played since 2002. Although she was unranked, she won 26 successive matches to notch three further $25,000 tournament wins and another $50,000 title, increasing her career singles title count to 18, only to have her winning streak finally snapped by in the semifinal of the $50,000 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 $25,000 tournament to compatriot , before returning to the WTA circuit, thanks to a wildcard entry into qualifying at the . There, she defeated , , and before losing in the deciding-set tie-break after a very close second-round main-draw tussle against newly crowned US Open Champion , 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-5 player.
The very next week, Li battled her way through qualifying into the WTA event at (a Tier IV event at the time, though since has been upgraded to Tier III), then beat , , , and in the main draw to reach the final, where she overcame to win her first WTA Tour title. By doing so, Li became the first Chinese tennis player to win a WTA event.蔡卓宜多大
On the back of the ranking points accrued through this result, on October 4, 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 $50,000 ITF 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 . 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. 2008[]
Li Na had not played a professional match in half a year and had resultantly slipped to no. 29 in the WTA rankings when she returned from her rib injury in January 2008 to compete at the in , Australia. In the first round, she narrowly defeated seventh seed . After a comfortable second round victory over , she was drawn to meet the top seed in the quarterfinals. Li won their encounter in straight sets, advancing to the semifinals, where she edged past. In the final, she narrowly prevailed against , not only ending her 3-year title drought (since Guangzhou 2004) but scoring her second WTA singles title of her career.
Despite rising back up to world no. 24 following this victory, she then withdrew from the 2008 Mediba
钢材性能nk International in Sydney, after suffering a right knee injury. Her failure to defend her previous year's semifinal performance at this event cost her 125 ranking points, which dipped her ranking back down to no. 30 for the week beginning 14 January.
Going into the 2008 Australian Open, she had a further 140 ranking points to defend from her fourth-round performance in 2007. Faced with a relatively lenient draw in the early rounds, she survived a close three-set tussle
with in the first round, before surpassing in straight sets in round two. A revitalised remained between her and the defence of her ranking points, and although Li Na won the first set convincingly, she faltered thereafter and finally ceded the match to her Polish opponent by a single break of serve in the closely fought deciding set. Having slipped three places to world no. 33 by the time she entered the Tier II tournament at in early February, she nonetheless progressed to the semifinals with back-to-back-to-back straight-sets wins over Russian veteran , Slovak world no. 45 , and on-form Swedish world no. 66. However, she withered in the semifinals against world no. 47 , despite having taken an early lead with a break of service in the first set, ultimately ceding the match to her Italian opponent in two sets. This tournament brought her back up within the top 30 at world no. 29.
The next week in the Tier I , Li met Likhovtseva again in the first round. This time, after taking the first set comfortably, she was challenged to a much tougher battle, but eventually won in three sets. In round 2, she scored her second straight-sets victory in four career head-to-heads against Russian world no. 6 (whom she had last beaten at the French Open in 2005), saving a set point in the first set tie-break, before recovering to win. In the third round, she enjoyed a more comfortable victory over Israeli world no. 17 , recovering from a 1–3 deficit in the second set. In the quarterfinals, she met her old rival and friend world no. 4 , coming into the match with a winning 3–1 head-to-head record to her credit against the Serbian player. By d efeating Janković she extended this record to 4:1 and moved into the semifinals, where she played , against whom she had won both of her previous encounters. Despite taking the first set, Li lost the second by the same scoreline; and although she was 3–2 up in the final set, she then ceded four successive games to her opponent to lose the match.
Her ranking having risen back to no. 23 on the strength of this performance, she was prevented from consolidating on this recovery by suffering a right knee injury, which forced her to pull out of her scheduled entries into both the Tier II event at in early March and the Tier I tournament at in the middle of the month. She returned to action at the in Eastbourne, winning one round before losing to . She then contested Wimbledon, defeating before losing to .
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