 Clijsters at the 2002 US Open Kim Clijsters, (born on June 8, 1983) is a Belgian tennis player. On 10 august, 2003 she achieved the first rank on the WTA list, but she lost it again to fellow Belgian Justine Henin-Hardenne.
She was an accomplished junior player: in 1998 she was runner-up in the Wimbledon junior singles, she won the French Open junior doubles with Jelena Dokic and the US Open junior doubles with Eva Dyrberg, and finished the year ranked number 11 in singles and number 4 in doubles in the ITF junior world rankings.
In 1999 she made the breakthrough into the senior ranks of women's tennis. At Wimbledon, she played through the qualifying to make the main draw, where she beat Amanda Coetzer en route to reaching the fourth round, where she lost to her childhood idol Steffi Graf. Later that summer, Clijsters reached the third round of the US Open, where at one stage she served for the match against, but ultimately lost to, the eventual 1999 US Open champion Serena Williams. In the autumn of 1999, Clijsters won her first WTA singles title at Luxembourg, and then her first WTA doubles title at Bratislava with Laurence Courtois.
She climbed her way up the rankings over the next couple of years, reaching her first Grand Slam final at Roland Garros 2001, where she lost an extremely close match to Jennifer Capriati, by a score of 12-10 in the final set. Her next important breakthrough came at the end of 2002, when she won the year-end WTA championships in Los Angeles, scoring a huge win in the final over the world number one at the time, Serena Williams.
Clijsters had the most successful year of her career so far in 2003, when she won eight tournaments, including the WTA championships, reached two Grand Slam finals at Roland Garros and the US Open, losing on both occasions to her compatriot Justine Henin-Hardenne, and was ranked number one in the world for several weeks, although she eventually finished the season at number two behind Henin-Hardenne.
Clijsters started 2004 by reaching her fourth Grand Slam final at the Australian Open, where she lost again to Henin-Hardenne; and then went on a very successful run where she won two titles at the Paris Indoors and Antwerp tournaments. Unfortunately, Clijsters then began to have injury problems with her wrist, which eventually required surgery and forced her to withdraw from the rest of the 2004 Grand Slam tournaments. She is expected to make her return to the WTA tour in her home country tournament, the Proximus Diamond Games in Antwerp, in February 2005.
In total she has won 21 singles titles in her career so far. Two of those 21 titles, she won at the WTA Tour Championships in Los Angeles, California in 2002 and 2003, when she defeated Frenchwoman Amélie Mauresmo.
She announced her engagement to long-time partner Australian player Lleyton Hewitt in November 2003, but they split up in October 2004.
She also has a younger sister named Elke, who like her sister was an accomplished junior player, and who finished 2002 as the ITF World Junior Doubles champion, but back injuries forced Elke to retire from her professional tennis career in 2004.
Grand Slam achievements
Titles (21)
| Legend
|
| Grand Slam (0)
|
| WTA Championships (2)
|
| WTA Tour (19)
|
Performance Timeline
See also
External link
|
