Chinese tennis officials were keeping their eyes fixed on the
2008 Olympics after Li Na become the country's first seeded singles
player in a grand slam draw.
Li was seeded 28th for the Wimbledon championships on the back
of her WTA ranking of 30th, a record high for a Chinese singles
player.
"We are pleased but not getting carried away, knowing that we
are still far from our Olympic goals," a spokesman for the Chinese
Tennis Association (CTA) said.
"Our people have very high expectations of the 2008 Games as
they are being held in Beijing."
Li, 24, started her sporting career aged five as a badminton
player in her native Wuhan. After a year a tennis coach persuaded
her parents to allow her to switch to the ball game.
Over the next 14 years she moved through the sports system to
the national squad and on to the lower rungs of the professional
game before suddenly quitting to go to university in 2002.
"I had been always playing for the others, more in sorrow than
in joy," she told Beijing News last year.
In two years at university in her home city, she never once
picked up a tennis racket, instead finding an outlet for her
athleticism in Taekwondo, table tennis, badminton and dancing.
It was only the intervention of her boyfriend, who said she
might one day regret quitting the game that led her to answer the
call from national tennis officials and return to the court in
2004.
Within months, she had become the first Chinese player to win a
singles title on the WTA tour with victory as a qualifier in the
southern city of Guangzhou.
Since then, Li has made steady progress up the world rankings,
breaking into the top 100 in October 2004 and reaching her second
WTA final at Estoril in 2005.
A second defeat in the final at Estoril this year, when she
withdrew through injury to hand the title to compatriot Zheng Jie,
did not stop her march up the rankings.
Reaching the third round of the singles and winning the doubles
title with Jelena Jankovic at the Birmingham grasscourt tournament
last week gave her a boost ahead of her first appearance in the
Wimbledon singles draw.
?
(Reuters via CRI June 22, 2006)