Martina Hingis

Martina Hingis (, Martina Hingisová; born 30 September 1980) is a Swiss former professional tennis player.

Hingis was the first Swiss player, male or female, to have won a major title and attain the world No. 1 ranking.

She spent a total of 209 weeks as the singles world No. 1 and 90 weeks as doubles world No. 1, holding both No. 1 rankings simultaneously for 29 weeks.

Hingis's parents divorced when she was six, and she and her mother defected from Czechoslovakia in 1987 and emigrated to Trübbach (Wartau) in Switzerland when she was seven.

Her mother remarried to a Swiss man, Andreas Zogg, a computer technician.

Hingis acquired Swiss citizenship through naturalization.

Hingis speaks four languages: German, Czech, English and French.

Hingis set a series of "youngest-ever" records during the 1990s, including youngest-ever Grand Slam champion and youngest-ever world No. 1. Before ligament injuries in both ankles forced her to withdraw temporarily from professional tennis in early 2003, at the age of 22, she had won 40 singles titles and 36 doubles titles and, according to Forbes, was the highest-paid female athlete in the world for five consecutive years, 1997 to 2001.

In 1993, 12-year-old Hingis became the youngest player to win a Grand Slam junior title: the girls' singles at the French Open.

In 1994, she retained her French Open junior title, won the girls' singles title at Wimbledon, and reached the final of the US Open.

She made her WTA debut at the Zurich Open in October 1994, two weeks after turning 14, and ended 1994 ranked world No. 87.

In 1996, Hingis became the youngest Grand Slam champion of all time, when she teamed with Helena Suková at Wimbledon to win the women's doubles title at age 15 years and 9 months.

She also won her first professional singles title that year at Filderstadt, Germany.

She reached the singles quarterfinals of the 1996 Australian Open and the singles semifinals of the 1996 US Open.

Following her win at Filderstadt, Hingis defeated the reigning Australian Open champion and co-top ranked (with Steffi Graf) Monica Seles in the final in Oakland, but lost to Graf in the year-end WTA Tour Championships final in five sets.

She won five major singles titles, 13 major women's doubles titles (including the Grand Slam in 1998), and seven major mixed doubles titles, for a combined total of 25 major titles.

In addition, she won the season-ending WTA Finals two times in singles and three in doubles, an Olympic silver medal in doubles, and a record 17 Tier I singles titles.

Widely considered an all-time tennis great, Hingis was ranked by Tennis magazine in 2005 as the eighth-greatest female player of the preceding 40 years.

After several surgeries and long recoveries, Hingis returned to the WTA Tour in 2006, climbing to world No. 6, winning two Tier I tournaments, and receiving the Laureus World Sports Award for Comeback of the Year.

Hingis became engaged to Czech tennis player Radek Štěpánek in November 2006, but the couple broke off the engagement in August 2007.

She retired in November 2007 after being hampered by a hip injury for several months.

In January 2008, the International Tennis Federation suspended Hingis for two years following a positive test for a metabolite of cocaine in 2007.

In December 2009, Hingis became engaged to then-38-year-old Andreas Bieri, a Swiss attorney she had been living with since the summer of 2009, but the couple broke off the engagement in April 2010.

On 10 December 2010, in Paris, Hingis married then-24-year-old Thibault Hutin, a French equestrian show jumper she had met at a competition in April of that year.

She was named one of the "30 Legends of Women's Tennis: Past, Present and Future" by TIME in June 2011.

In July 2013, Hingis again returned from retirement to play the doubles events of the North American hardcourt season.

In 2013, Hingis was elected into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, and was appointed two years later the organization's first ever Global Ambassador.

Hingis was born in Košice, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia) as Martina Hingisová, to Melanie Molitorová and Karol Hingis, both of whom were tennis players.

Molitorová was a professional tennis player who was once ranked tenth among women in Czechoslovakia, and was determined to develop Hingis into a top player as early as pregnancy.

On 8 July 2013, Hingis told the Swiss newspaper Schweizer Illustrierte the pair had been separated since the beginning of the year.

During her doubles-only comeback, she won four major women's doubles tournaments, six major mixed doubles tournaments (completing the career Grand Slam in mixed doubles), 27 WTA Tour titles, and the silver medal in women's doubles at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

Hingis retired for the third and final time after the 2017 WTA Finals, while ranked as the world No. 1.

On 20 July 2018, Hingis married sports physician Harald Leemann in Switzerland in a secret ceremony at the Grand Resort Bad Ragaz.

Hingis and Leemann had been in a relationship for almost a year before they got married.

They were both 37.

On 30 September 2018 (her 38th birthday) Hingis announced, via social media, her first pregnancy.

Her father was ranked as high as 19th in the Czechoslovak tennis rankings.

Martina Hingis spent her early childhood growing up in the town of Rožnov pod Radhoštěm (now in the Czech Republic).

She gave birth to a daughter, Lia, on 26 February 2019.

Hingis began playing tennis when she was two years old and entered her first tournament at age four.