THE BALL'S INHER COURT

China's most celebrated tennis star Li Na opens up about her career, influencing young athletes and her continuous learning journey

- Richard Lord

Tennis chose Li Na. The 42-year-old from Wuhan is China’s most successful ever player of the sport, scaling its highest peaks with a brace of Grand Slam wins, first in France in 2011 and then Australia in 2014, that made her Asia’s first Grand Slam winner; and with a world ranking that went as high as 2—at that time, only the great Serena Williams stood ahead of her.

But Li Na didn’t choose tennis. “I was forced into it,” she tells Tatler. “When I was young, I didn’t have a clear idea of what kind of person I wanted to become in the future. The choice of tennis was because my father thought I was a bit chubby and wanted me to engage in a sport. For people of our generation, it was rare to have clear goals we wanted to achieve when we were young. Most of us were following our parents’ wishes.”

Nonetheless, her career led her to a position of unprecedented impact and influence among Chinese athletes. She joined the Rolex family of Testimonees in 2011, the same year she won at Roland-Garros. In 2013, she was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine. She has been largely responsible for catapulting tennis from being a fairly obscure sport in China to one where the nation now has six women in the top 100 of the WTA rankings. She directly inspired and has personally given advice to her fellow Rolex Testimonee Zheng Qinwen, the second Chinese player to break into the top 10, who won gold at the recent Paris Olympics, after reaching her first Grand Slam final in Australia earlier in the year. She even has her own co-branded clothing line, launched in 2017.

Li retains a bracingly unsentimental approach to her own success, though.

“I admit it’s unprecedented, but there will definitely be successors,” she says. “Because tennis hasn’t been developing in China for long, it’s still considered a new thing for everyone. We still have great hope and a long way to go.