here 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.
What Qinwen Zheng Could Mean for Tennis, and for China
