Li Na

Li Na (born 26 February 1982) is a Chinese former professional tennis player.

Li Na was born on 26 February 1982 in Wuhan, Hubei.

Her mother is Li Yanping ; her father, Li Shengpeng, was a professional badminton player and later worked as a sales rep for a Wuhan-based company.

He died from a rare cardiovascular disease when Li was fourteen.

Her coach did not tell her that her father had died for several days, thinking it would affect her game.

At age six, Li followed her father's footsteps and started playing badminton, which honed her reflexes.

Just before she turned eight, Li was persuaded to switch to tennis by coach Xia Xiyao of the Wuhan youth tennis club.

Her instructors taught tennis through negative reinforcement, which affected Li's confidence in later years.

Li joined China's National Tennis Team in 1997.

The following year, Li, sponsored by Nike, went to John Newcombe Academy in Texas to study tennis.

She studied there for ten months and returned to China.

Growing up, her favourite tennis player was Andre Agassi.

She turned professional in 1999 at the age of sixteen.

At the end of 2002, Li left the national tennis team to study part-time at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), where she completed her bachelor's degree in journalism in 2009.

The Chinese media cited various reasons for this.

Some reported that the relationship between her and her teammate and future husband, Jiang Shan, was opposed by the national team's management, some reported that her coach, Yu Liqiao , was too strict and demanding, while other reports claimed that her request for a personal coach did not go through.

However, some regarded that it was just the health problem leading to the retirement.

The New York Times reported that one of the reasons was that a team leader wanted her to play through by taking hormone medicine as Li struggled with her performance due to hormone imbalance.

She later told CNN that she had felt sick everyday and didn't want her life to be only for tennis.

Among her other most notable achievements, she was the first Chinese player to win a WTA Tour title at the Guangzhou International Women's Open in 2004, the first to reach a Grand Slam singles quarterfinal at the 2006 Wimbledon Championships, and the first to break into the world's top ten.

Li returned to the national team in 2004 to "give back" for their help during her earlier career.

On January 27, 2006, Li married Jiang Shan who then became her personal coach.

Li quit the national team as well as the state-run sports system in 2008 under an experimental reform policy for tennis players.

This change was called "Fly Solo" by Chinese media.

As a result, Li had the freedom to hire her own coaching staff and she would be solely responsible for the cost of training and coaching and tour expense.

She could keep more of her winnings, with only twelve percent of her winnings going to the Chinese Tennis Association development fund as opposed to 65 percent previously.

Over the course of her career, Li won nine singles titles including two Grand Slam titles at the 2011 French Open and 2014 Australian Open.

Those victories made her the first Grand Slam singles champion from Asia, male or female.

She also became the first player representing an Asian country to appear in a Grand Slam singles final, finishing as the runner-up at the 2011 Australian Open.

In the summer of 2012, the requirement of contribution to the Chinese tennis development fund was lifted and Li kept all her prize money.

Li was also the runner-up at the 2013 Australian Open and 2013 WTA Tour Championships, a three-time quarterfinalist at Wimbledon and a semifinalist at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2013 US Open.

By 2013, Li's accomplishments had made her the most successful Asian tennis player in history and it landed her on Time magazine's list of 100 Most Influential People in the World as just one of only four athletes to be named that year.

Former world No. 1 Chris Evert wrote: "Tennis has exploded in China. The country now has some 15 million tennis players; 116 million watched Li win the French Open. That kind of exposure is crucial to our sport, and it never would have happened without Li."

She achieved a career-high WTA ranking of world No. 2 on 17 February 2014.

Li retired from professional tennis on 19 September 2014, at the age of 32.

On 19 January 2015, Li announced that she and her husband were expecting their first child.

She gave birth to her daughter Alisa in June 2015.

On 5 June 2016, Li was commissioned by Special Olympics as a Global Ambassador.

Her second child, a boy, was born on 23 December 2016.

In 2019, she was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.