Kim Antonie Lode Clijsters ( ; ; born 8 June 1983)
is a Belgian
tennis player. She is a former
World No.
1 ranked player
in singles and in doubles. As of September 28, 2009, she is ranked
World No. 17.
Clijsters has won 35
WTA
singles titles and 11 WTA doubles titles.
She won the US
Open singles title in 2005 and 2009. She's also
won the
WTA Tour
Championships singles title in 2002 and 2003.
In doubles, she's won
the French
Open and Wimbledon titles in 2003. Clijsters was twice a
singles runner-up at the French Open and a one-time runner-up at
the Australian
Open, also reaching two Wimbledon singles
semi-finals. She announced her retirement with immediate
effect on 6 May 2007, but almost two years later, on 26 March 2009,
she publicly declared her intent to return to the WTA tour for the
2009 summer hard court season.
In only her third tournament back, she won
her second US
Open title, becoming the first unseeded player and
wildcard to
win the tournament, and the first mother to win a major since
Evonne Goolagong in
1980.
Playing style
Clijsters is recognized for her deep, powerful, well-placed
groundstrokes, as well as her court-wide defense, characterized by
speed and athleticism. Clijsters, along with
Jelena Janković and
Svetlana Kuznetsova is among the few
tennis players on either the
Association of Tennis
Professionals or
Women's
Tennis Association tours who can slide (known as the
straddle) on all surfaces. After being defeated by
Clijsters in the
2005 Nasdaq-100
Open,
Maria Sharapova implied
that Clijsters' strength lies in how she always forces her opponent
to hit an extra shot, that "you just have to expect that she's
going to get every ball back".
Personal life
Clijsters
was born on 8 June 1983, in Bilzen, Limburg, in the
Flemish
Region of Belgium. She is daughter of
Lei Clijsters, a former successful soccer
player, and Els Vandecaetsbeek, a former national gymnastics
champion.
Lei Clijsters died of
lung cancer on 4 January 2009. Clijsters
says that she inherited footballer's legs from her father and a
gymnast's flexibility from her mother. Kim's younger sister
Elke finished 2002 as the
ITF World Junior Doubles
champion and retired in 2004 after back injuries.
In December 2003, Clijsters announced her engagement to Australian
Lleyton Hewitt, but their
relationship ended in October 2004.
In October 2006, Clijsters announced her
engagement to American basketball player
Brian Lynch, who is based
in Kim's hometown of Bree. In
an interview with
Sportweekend, Clijsters stated that she
was retiring to start a family. Clijsters and Lynch married
secretly on 13 July 2007, at 6:00 in the morning at the Bree city
hall. She was married by the mayor, with sister Elke, Lynch's
brother Pat Lynch, and both sets of parents present.
Clijsters
gave birth to a daughter on 27 February 2008, at 1:35 pm at the
Vesalius hospital in Tongeren,
Belgium. The girl, Jada Ellie, weighed 3.035 kg and
measured 51 cm. Clijsters's mother had a son named Zeth with
second husband Jan Goossens a few weeks after Jada Ellie was
born.
Tennis career
Junior career
Clijsters was an accomplished junior player. In singles, she
finished as runner-up in the
1998 Wimbledon junior event,
placing 11th in the year-end singles ranking. In the same year in
doubles, Clijsters won the
French
Open title with
Jelena Dokić,
and the
US Open with
Eva Dyrberg, ending the season as number four in
the
International Tennis
Federation junior doubles world ranking.
1999
In 1999, Clijsters made her breakthrough professionally.
Playing
through the qualifying rounds, she made it through the main draw of
Wimbledon, wherein she defeated tenth ranked Amanda Coetzer en route to the fourth round,
where Clijsters lost to her childhood idol Steffi Graf. Later that summer,
Clijsters reached the third round of the US
Open, losing to eventual champion Serena Williams after serving for the
match. In the autumn, Clijsters won her first
Women's Tennis Association (WTA)
singles title at
Luxembourg.
She followed up with
her first WTA doubles title at Bratislava, partnering Laurence
Courtois.
2000-2002
Clijsters climbed up the rankings over the next couple of years.
In 2001,
she reached her first Tier I final at the
tournament
in Indian Wells, California, losing to Serena
Williams in a match overshadowed by controversy.
Clijsters
also reached her first Grand
Slam final at the French
Open, where she lost to Jennifer Capriati 12–10 in the third
set. This two-hour, 21-minute match featured the longest
third set in a French Open women's final. Clijsters was four times
within two points of winning before Capriati prevailed. Her next
important breakthrough came at the end of 2002, when she won the
year-end
Home Depot
Championships in Los Angeles, defeating top ranked Serena
Williams in the final. This was only the fifth defeat of the year
for Williams and snapped her 18-match winning streak. On her way to
the final, Clijsters defeated fourth ranked
Justine Henin and second ranked
Venus Williams, becoming just the fourth
player to beat both of the Williams sisters in the same event. She
also equaled the event's record for the fewest games dropped.
2003
Clijsters won nine singles tournaments and seven doubles titles in
2003, including the WTA Tour Championships and two
Tier I singles tournaments. She also reached two
Grand Slam singles finals, losing at both the French Open and the
US Open to Henin.
At the Australian Open, Clijsters lost in the semi-final to Serena
Williams 4–6, 6–3, 7–5 after Clijsters led 5–1 in the third set and
held a match point at 5–2. She also lost in the semi-final
at Wimbledon.
Her Tier I singles titles were at the
Telecom
Italia Masters in Rome, where she defeated Amélie Mauresmo in the final, and at
the Pacific Life
Open in Indian Wells, California, where she defeated Lindsay Davenport in the final. On
11 August 2003, Clijsters attained the World No. 1 ranking, holding
the spot for 12 non-consecutive weeks during the remainder of the
year, and was the first player to be top ranked by the WTA without
first winning a Grand Slam singles title. The World No.
1 ranking
was at stake in October during the final of the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix in
Filderstadt, Germany. Clijsters rallied from a set down
to beat Henin. The match marked only the eighth time that the top
two players battled for the top ranking. Even though Clijsters won
that match, she finished the year ranked World No. 2, just behind
Henin.
2004
Clijsters started 2004 by reaching her fourth career Grand Slam
final at the Australian Open, where she lost once more to Henin.
She then won two consecutive titles in
Paris and
Antwerp. While defending her Tier I
title at the Pacific Life Open, however, Clijsters began to have
problems with her wrist, eventually requiring surgery and forcing
her to withdraw from most tournaments. She attempted a comeback
towards the end of the year, winning several matches, before
reaggravating the injury.
2005
In February, after almost a year of inactivity caused by injuries,
she made her return to the
Women's Tennis Association tour
by participating in her home country tournament at
Antwerp, losing to
Venus Williams in a quarter-final. She then
completed her comeback in March and April when she won, as an
unseeded player, 14 straight matches to claim two
Tier I titles and regained a top-20 ranking.
At the
Pacific Life
Open in Indian Wells, California, Clijsters was ranked World No. 133 but
defeated World No. 5
Elena
Dementieva in the semi-final and World No. 1
Lindsay Davenport in the final.
Immediately after that win, Clijsters
defeated four top-6 players in straight sets to win the NASDAQ-100
Open in Key Biscayne, Florida. Clijsters joined
Steffi Graf as the only women to win the Indian
Wells-Key Biscayne double. After losing to Clijsters in the Key
Biscayne final,
Maria Sharapova
said, "I think the biggest surprise was that it was her 14th match
and yet I didn’t feel like she was physically fatigued at all. She
is a very strong girl and she can play all day. Running from corner
to corner is like a piece of cake for her."
Clijsters
finally won a Grand Slam singles
title at the US
Open. It was her first victory after reaching
four Grand Slam finals previously. Clijsters defeated tenth-seeded
Venus Williams in the quarter-finals 4–6, 7–5, 6–1, winning 11 of
the last 13 games after Williams had led 6–4, 4–2. Clijsters also
needed three sets to defeat top-seeded Sharapova in the semi-final
but needed only two sets to defeat
Mary
Pierce in the final. By winning the
US Open Series—a string of summer
tournaments in North America before the US Open itself—Clijsters
received a 100 percent bonus to the
US$1.1
million in prize money she received for winning the US Open. Her
US$2.2 million paycheck was the largest payday in women's sports
history.
On 15 September, within days after her US Open victory, it was
announced that the cooperation between Clijsters and her coach,
Marc Dehous, would come to an end; it
was rumored that this was due to her not granting Dehous a bonus
following her victory.
At the year-ending
Sony
Ericsson Championships, Clijsters was eliminated after only two
matches. She lost her first match to Pierce 6–1, 4–6, 7–6 and her
second match to
Amélie Mauresmo
6–3, 7–6. Clijsters said in interviews that her defeats were due to
fatigue and maybe
jet lag, having had a
relatively short time to adjust and acclimatize before the
tournament began. Although she won her third match in the
round-robin tournament against
Dementieva, it was considered a
dead
rubber.
Overall,
she won nine singles events in 2005, her last one being at the
Gaz de France Stars in Hasselt. She ended the year ranked World No.
2.
2006
Clijsters started the year by winning an exhibition tournament, the
Watson Water Challenge, in Hong Kong. On her way to the title she
defeated
Jie Zheng,
Elena Dementieva, and top ranked
Lindsay Davenport. Clijsters then withdrew
from her semi-final match at the
WTA tournament in
Sydney, citing a left hip muscle
strain.
At the
Australian
Open, Clijsters defeated former champion Martina Hingis in the quarter-finals 6–3,
2–6, 6–4 before retiring from her semi-final match with Amélie Mauresmo. Despite the
loss, the ranking points she accumulated were enough to regain the
World No. 1 ranking, a position she last held on 9 November 2003.
She was the first tennis player, male or female, to rise from
outside the Top 100 (World No. 134) to World No. 1 in less than a
year. Clijsters' loss to Mauresmo in the Australian Open semi-final
was due to an ankle injury.
Although she had been expected to miss at
least eight weeks to recover, Clijsters returned two weeks later at
the Proximus Diamond Games in
Antwerp. She lost the final of that tournament to
Mauresmo in three sets.
Clijsters won her first title of the year at a
clay court event in
Warsaw, defeating
Svetlana Kuznetsova in the final.
At the
French
Open in May, Clijsters reached the semi-final without
losing a set, defeating Hingis in the quarter-finals 7–6,
6–1. However, she lost to
Justine
Henin in the semi-final 6–3, 6–2 on her 23rd birthday.
She was
seeded second going into Wimbledon but was again eliminated in the semi-final by
Henin.
Clijsters collected her second title of the year as the top seed in
Stanford, defeating
Patty Schnyder in the final.
Clijsters then reached the final in
San
Diego, falling to second-seeded
Maria Sharapova in straight sets. This was
her first loss to Sharapova in five career meetings.
On 16
August, after receiving a first round bye at the Tier I Rogers Cup
in Montreal, Clijsters faced Canadian Stéphanie Dubois in the second
round. Having won the first set 6–1 and trailing 2–3 in the
second set, Clijsters slipped and fell on her left wrist and was
forced to retire from the match.
On 18 August 2006, Clijsters announced on
her official website that the condition of her wrist was worse than
she had expected and that she would be unable to defend her title
at the US
Open. She also missed the
Fed Cup final against
Italy, which Italy won 3–2.
At the
Gaz de France Stars, her
first tournament in more than two months, Clijsters successfully
defended her title by beating qualifier
Kaia
Kanepi in the final. At the year-ending
WTA Tour Championships, Clijsters
lost a semi-final to Mauresmo 6–2, 3–6, 6–3 after defeating
Dementieva and Kuznetsova and losing to Sharapova in the round
robin phase of the tournament.
2007
Clijsters started the year by winning an exhibition tournament, the
Watson Water Challenge, in Hong Kong. On her way to the title, she
defeated
Jie Zheng,
Patty Schnyder, and top ranked
Maria Sharapova.
Clijsters then won
the Medibank International in
Sydney,
Australia, defeating Jelena
Janković in the final after being down a match point. At
the
Australian Open, the fourth
seeded Clijsters defeated sixth seed
Martina Hingis in a quarter-final match
before losing to Sharapova in the semi-finals 6–4, 6–2.
She
played her last tournament before retirement in Belgium at the
Proximus Diamond Games in
Antwerp, where she lost to Amélie Mauresmo in the final.
At the
Sony
Ericsson Open in Key Biscayne, Florida, Clijsters lost in the fourth round to Li Na 4–6, 6–4, 6–2. In May, she
failed to defend her title in
Warsaw,
losing in the second round to
Julia
Vakulenko 7–6(3), 6–3. This was Clijsters's last professional
match until 2009.
Retirement and 2009 comeback
On 6 May 2007, citing injuries, Clijsters announced on her official
website that she was retiring from professional tennis
immediately.
Two years
later, Clijsters, along with Tim Henman,
Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi, played an exhibition event on
Wimbledon's Centre
Court in May, an event that she and Henman won 7–6 in a
tiebreak. She also played a singles rubber against Graf,
winning 6–4. In July, she won both of her singles matches with the
St. Louis Aces of
World Team Tennis.
She officially announced during a press conference on 26 March
2009, that wildcards for the Cincinnati and Toronto tournaments had
been granted to her. Additionally, she said she would be playing in
this year's US Open, after which she plans to evaluate the comeback
in terms of success and the feasibility of combining it with her
family life. Clijsters also stated that she preferred to think of
it as a "second career" instead of a comeback, because so many
factors (marriage, a baby, the recent death of her father) were
different compared to her first career.
Starting
her second career at the
Western & Southern Financial Group Women's Open in Cincinnati, Clijsters defeated World No. 13
Marion Bartoli in the first round 6–4, 6–3.
In her next two matches, she defeated World No. 20
Patty Schnyder 6–2, 7–5 and World No.
6 and
reigning French
Open champion Svetlana
Kuznetsova 6–4, 4–6, 6–2. In the quarter-finals, she
lost to World No. 1
Dinara Safina 6–2,
7–5.
At her
next tournament, the Rogers Cup in
Toronto, she received a wildcard to play in the main draw and
defeated British qualifier Elena
Baltacha in the first round. In the second round, she
defeated World No. 9
Victoria
Azarenka 7–5, 4–6, 6–1 but lost to World No. 4
Jelena Jankovic in the third round 1–6, 6–3,
7–5, after serving for the match at 5–3.
She then received a wildcard to play in the main draw of the
US Open. She easily won her
first round match over
Viktoriya
Kutuzova 6–1, 6–1. She won her second round match, defeating
World No. 14
Marion Bartoli for the
second time in three weeks 5–7, 6–1, 6–2. She then defeated
compatriot
Kirsten Flipkens 6–0,
6–2 in the third round. She went on to upset World No. 3
Venus Williams in the fourth round 6–0, 0–6,
6–4. This was only Clijsters' 11th competitive match since coming
out of retirement. Clijsters beat 18th seed
Na Li in straight sets 6–2, 6–4 to reach the
semi-finals where she faced defending champion and World No. 2
Serena Williams, winning 6–4, 7–5
after Williams was given a point penalty on match point after a
dispute with an official over a foot fault call.
Clijsters became the
first unseeded finalist at the US Open since Venus Williams in 1997, and the first
wildcard to ever reach the US
Open final. With her victory over Serena,
Clijsters became the only player to have beaten both Williams
sisters in the same tournament twice. In the final she defeated
ninth seed
Caroline Wozniacki
7–5, 6–3 to win her second US Open title.Her US Open victory placed
her in the top 20 in the world rankings. She also became the first
Wild Card champion in US Open history and the first mother to win a
Grand Slam title in the Open era since
Evonne Goolagong Cawley won
Wimbledon in 1980.
Clijsters then receives a wildcard to play at the
2009 BGL Luxembourg Open in
Luxembourg, as the second seed. She eased through her opening match
6-2, 6-2 against
Meghann
Shaughnessy but fell to
Patty
Schnyder in a close second round encounter 4-6, 6-3, 6-7.
Coaches
- 1992–1996: Bart Van Kerckhove
- 1996–2002: Carl Maes
- 2002–2005: Marc Dehous
- since 2009: Wim Fisette
Records
2001
- Clijsters became the first Belgian—man or woman—to reach a
Grand Slam singles final in the Open Era.
2003
- Clijsters became not only the first Belgian—man or woman—to be
ranked World No. 1, but also did so without winning a Grand Slam tournament. Clijsters is one
of only five women to have been ranked World No. 1 in singles and
doubles simultaneously (the others being Martina Navratilova, Martina Hingis, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario and
Lindsay Davenport).
- Clijsters compiled a 90–12 singles record. Her singles win
total was the highest single-season total by any woman since
Navratilova in 1982. Clijsters was the first woman to play more
than 100 singles matches in a year since Chris Evert in 1974.
2005
- At
the NASDAQ-100
Open in Key Biscayne, Florida, Clijsters became only the second player (the first
being Steffi Graf in 1995 and 1996) to
win the Pacific Life
Open-NASDAQ-100 Open double. En route to the Key Biscayne
victory, she beat the sixth (Anastasia
Myskina), fifth (Elena
Dementieva), second (Amélie
Mauresmo), and third (Maria
Sharapova) seeds in consecutive matches.
- Following Clijsters's victory in the
US Open Series and the subsequent
US
Open, she collected US$2.2 million in
prize money, the largest single purse ever won by a female
athlete. To that date, she held a North American hardcourt
win-loss record of 36–1.
- Clijsters had a 22-match winning streak from August to October.
During the streak, she won tournaments in Los Angeles, Toronto and Luxembourg, and the US
Open.
2006
- In returning to the World No. 1 ranking after the Australian
Open in January, Clijsters broke a rankings
record. She was ranked as low as World No. 134 in March
2005, so her return to the top spot in a ten-month span was the
fastest and biggest leap in women's tennis history.
2009
Awards
Clijsters is considered by her peers as one of the most likeable
players on tour. This, combined with her accomplishments on court,
has earned her numerous citations:
2000
2001
2002
- Karen Krantzcke Sportsmanship Award (for 2001)
2003
- Karen Krantzcke Sportsmanship Award (for 2002)
2004
2005
- ITF World
Champion
- WTA Tour Championships Race winner
- Belgian Sportswoman of the Year
- International Tennis Writers Association (ITWA) Player of the
Year
- International Tennis Writers Ambassador for Tennis
2006
2007
- Karen Krantzcke Sportsmanship Award (for 2006)
2009
- VTV Tennis Performance of the Year
Career statistics
See also
References
- Kim's Diary-Thanks you 6 May 2007
- Clijsters announces return to tour 26 March
2009
-
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/tennis/09/13/clijsters.wins.ap/index.html
- Kim Clijsters - Game Profile
- Father of Kim Clijsters Dies SI.com, 4 January
2009
- Face to face by The Guardian (5 October 2003)
- Hewitt and Clijsters reveal split BBC Sport (22 October 2004)
- Yahoo! Sports - Sports News, Scores, Rumors,
Fantasy Games, and more
- Retired tennis player Kim Clijsters gives birth to
daughter
- Clijsters takes Italian Open
- Clijsters wins to keep No. 1 ranking
- 2005 NASDAQ-100 Open News
- [1]
- Report: Clijsters to enter WTA events ESPN, 24
March 2009
- Clijsters makes winning start in comeback, 12
August 2009.
- Former World No.1 and US Open Champion Kim
Clijsters announces her retirement
External links