The role-model effect in sport is a double-edged sword. In the best of times, it helps a sporting culture thrive where every generation finds inspiration from the previous and the champions’ ecosystem is constantly replenished. But it can also have adverse consequences, burdening the athletes of successive generations with a standard that is impossible to live up to.
Qinwen Zheng has flourished in the former setting. The 22-year-old from China has looked up to compatriot Li Na — 2011 French Open and 2014 Australian Open champion, the first Asian to win a Grand Slam singles title and be ranked as high as No. 2 in the world — and zoomed up the tennis charts, reaching a career-best WTA ranking of No. 5 on Monday.
Epochal triumph
Zheng started the year by reaching the Australian Open final and ended it with a highly creditable runner-up finish at the WTA Finals last week. Sandwiched in between was the epochal triumph at the 2024 Paris Olympics, where she became the first Asian tennis player, male or female, to win a singles gold medal.
“Li Na won her first Grand Slam, and I then started thinking that, ‘Oh, the Asian player can also do something good in tennis. This is such an international sport,’” Zheng said, describing the influence of her role model. “I think that she put a little seed in my heart that I also want to do it. I want to try to be like her, you know, and even better.”
Although there is still a lot of ground for Zheng to cover before she can think of emulating, and eventually surpassing, her idol Li Na, her ascent over the last three seasons has been nothing short of staggering.
She started 2022 outside the top-100, and by the end of it, was ranked in the top-30 and was named the WTA Newcomer of the Year. At the Pan Pacific Open (WTA 500) in Tokyo in September 2022, she even became the first Chinese teenager to reach a WTA Tour final.
That year, she won her debut matches at all four Slams, beat 2018 French Open champion Simona Halep on the Roland-Garros clay and picked a set off eventual winner Iga Swiatek. By the end of 2023, she was top-20, had won her first two Tour titles and earned the WTA’s Most Improved Player of the Year award.
Teenaged success can be a great illusion. But Zheng, who started tennis at the age of seven near Wuhan, China, and has been training in Barcelona since 2019, has honed and bettered her craft like how novelists do their prose between the first and last drafts.
Zheng has always had a powerful…