There are approximately twenty-three million tennis players in China and exactly one Olympic gold medallist in singles, Qinwen Zheng. She has a nickname, Queenwen, which either is a lazy play on her name or tells you something. I suspect it tells you something. At the Paris Olympics she won her first-round match, against Sara Errani, 6–0, 6–0. In the third round, she defeated the American Emma Navarro, and then had a long exchange with Navarro at the net. “I just told her I didn’t respect her as a competitor,” Navarro explained to reporters. “I think she goes about things in a pretty cutthroat way.” Zheng had a cutthroat response: “I will not consider it an attack, because she lost the match.” In the next round, she sent the three-time Grand Slam winner Angelique Kerber into retirement. Then came Iga Świątek, the world No. 1 and four-time French Open winner, on Świątek’s favorite surface, the red clay of Roland-Garros. Zheng had lost to Świątek all six of the previous times they had played. Zheng won in two sets, “driven,” she said afterward, “by sheer determination” and a desire to honor her country. She went on to beat Donna Vekić, a Wimbledon semifinalist, to win gold.
The challenge, she said on the eve of the U.S. Open, was to keep the motivation. In January, Zheng had made the final of the Australian Open, but had been overwhelmed by Aryna Sabalenka, and then had failed to make it past the round of sixteen in eight of her next ten tournaments. After the Olympics, she wanted to cultivate consistency and mental fortitude. The athleticism was not in question: Zheng is tall, quick, and strong, with a powerful heavy-topspin forehand. What she really needed was to make some serves. Zheng has a hitch in her toss, which stands out like a beauty mark: it only exaggerates the elegance of her service motion. When Zheng makes her first serves, they are almost untouchable. The problem is that she misses them a lot—and her second serve is worse than most. In her first two matches in New York, she dropped the first set, largely thanks to erratic serving. Both times, she won the next two sets by making dramatically more first serves. In the second round, a win over Erika Andreeva, she had twenty aces.
What Zheng’s first-serve percentage means for the global health of tennis might seem like a strange question, but it’s one the actuaries are surely considering. When Li Na became the first Chinese player to win a Grand Slam singles title, at the French Open, in 2011, a hundred and sixteen million people in China were watching. After her win, sponsors raced to tap into that vast market. Western coaches moved to China to set up new academies. By 2019, the Women’s Tennis Association had more tournaments in China—ten—than in the United States, and China hosted that year’s W.T.A. Finals, in Shenzhen, with a total prize-money purse that dwarfed the men’s event, held that year in London.
Zheng was eleven when Li won her second Grand Slam title, at the Australian Open, in 2014. Zheng has said that the event planted a “dream seed” in her heart. By that point, she had already been living in a tennis academy, in Wuhan, two hundred and fifty miles away from her home town, for several years. Her father had brought her there when she was a child, to have her evaluated by a coach, and then, when the approval came, surprised her by leaving her there. Thousands of other Chinese children could tell the same story. Decades earlier, the government had established a state-funded system of sports schools, modelled on the Soviet Union’s, which plucked promising children from their families and cultivated their talents for the glory of China—a system that perhaps had its apotheosis at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
But, even by then, there was some suggestion, including among the political élite, that the country’s approach to sport should start evolving. Part of that meant adapting to the new ambitions of a burgeoning middle class, who had more disposable income and time to pursue and follow sports. Part of it was Li Na herself, who had bridled under and then broken away from the state system, which traditionally controlled the tournaments its players participated in, and obligated a player to commit a large percentage of professional earnings to the government. Her arrangement, in which she set her own schedule, chose her own coaches, and kept much of her money, was called “flying solo.” Li had a sometimes contentious relationship with the state-run Chinese press. But she was charismatic, funny, magnetic, and beloved not only abroad but by a younger generation in China, who called her “Big Sister Na.” Zheng was among them. She idolized Li, then emulated her, moving to Beijing to train with Li’s former coach. Then, in 2019, she and her mother moved to Barcelona; she was one of several Chinese players who left the country to pursue their tennis ambitions. No one seemed to question them.
The W.T.A. was not quiet about its focus on the Asian market, and China in particular. Then came the pandemic and China’s zero-COVID policy, which shut the tours out of the country, and, in November, 2021, a post on the social-media platform Weibo, in which the popular tennis player Peng Shuai accused a former Chinese Vice-Premier of having sexually assaulted her. The post was deleted, discussion was censored, and Peng officially recanted, but she also mostly disappeared from public view. The W.T.A., which has always prided itself on its pioneering commitment to women’s rights, announced that it was moving the tour out of China until it could assure itself of Peng’s safety. It kept this stance even after it became clear that the organization’s finances were in shambles—most apparently at the recent Finals, which have shuttled from Guadalajara in 2021, to Fort Worth in 2022, and to Cancún in 2023. Finally, last year, the W.T.A. admitted that its boycott had failed. Peng’s fate was still a mystery, but the tour would return to China.
Zheng won W.T.A. Newcomer of the Year in 2022. She did not talk about Peng or China, and seemed, publicly at least, unaffected by the controversy. She also had company: Chinese women were rising in the rankings, and now Chinese men were, too. Last year, Wu Yibing, a male Chinese player, won an A.T.P. tournament, in Dallas. At Wimbledon this year, eleven Chinese players appeared in the men’s and women’s main draws—the most at any major, ever. China now has six players ranked inside the W.T.A.’s top hundred, led by Zheng at No. 7. Wang Yafan is also still alive in the U.S. Open, upsetting Victoria Azarenka on Friday to reach the round of sixteen.
In August, after Zheng’s win at the Olympics, President Xi Jinping commended her, and her patriotic comments upon winning gold, especially. Shortly after, Zheng flew from Cincinnati, where she had played in a tournament, to China to attend a ceremony with Xi. On Friday, in New York, Zheng breezed through her third-round match, against Jule Niemeier, 6–2, 6–1, winning twenty-one of the twenty-five points in which she put a first serve in play. If she has a deep run at this year’s U.S. Open—even without counting her Olympic victory, which brought her no ranking points—she has a chance to qualify for a spot at the W.T.A. Finals, which are contested by the year’s eight most successful players. The event will not, however, be in Shenzhen. The tour is still paying for its principled stand in China. It was recently announced that the Finals will take place this year in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, instead.
What Qinwen Zheng Could Mean for Tennis, and for China
By admin
Via The New Yorker, a report on the growth of tennis in China and the complex role of the nation in the global sport:
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