Ons Jabeur

She also became the first Arab girl to win a junior Grand Slam singles title in history, and the first junior in general since Ismail El Shafei won the Wimbledon boys' title in 1964.

Ons Jabeur (born 28 August 1994) is a Tunisian professional tennis player.

She has a career-high ranking by the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) of world No. 2, achieved on 27 June 2022.

Jabeur is the current Tunisian number one, and the highest-ranked African and Arab tennis player in WTA and ATP rankings history.

She has won five singles titles on the WTA Tour, as well as eleven singles titles and one doubles title on the ITF Circuit.

Jabeur was the runner-up at Wimbledon in 2022 and 2023 and at the US Open in 2022, becoming the first African and Arab woman to contest a major singles final.

Jabeur was first exposed to tennis by her mother at three years old.

Jabeur began playing on the ITF Junior Circuit in August 2007 on the week of her 13th birthday.

With compatriot Nour Abbès, she won the doubles event of her debut tournament, the Grade 5 Al Fatah ITF Junior Tournament in Lebanon.

She defeated Abbès to win her first Grade 5 singles event at the 2009 Fujairah ITF Junior Tennis Championships in the United Arab Emirates, where she also won the doubles event with Abbès.

Later in the year, she started to have more success at higher-level tournaments, finishing runner-up at the Grade 2 International Junior Championships of Morocco and winning the Grade 2 Smash International Junior Championships in Egypt, both in singles.

She made her junior Grand Slam debut at the 2009 US Open, losing her opening match to Laura Robson.

She became pro in her teen years when she reached two junior major girls' singles finals at the French Open in 2010 and 2011, winning the latter and becoming the first African or Arab to win a junior major since 1964.

Jabeur started to produce strong results at the junior Grand Slam and other Grade A events in May 2010.

In the doubles event at the Trofeo Bonfiglio, she partnered with Charlène Seateun to reach the semifinals.

Two weeks later, she played the 2010 French Open and upset third seed Irina Khromacheva in the semifinals before finishing runner-up to Elina Svitolina.

She also performed well at Wimbledon, reaching the quarterfinals in singles and the semifinal in doubles.

She lost to Yulia Putintseva in singles, and Khromacheva and Svitolina in doubles alongside Monica Puig.

Putintseva defeated Jabeur again at the US Open.

Jabeur entered the doubles event with Putintseva and lost in the quarterfinals to Khromacheva again, who had partnered with Daria Gavrilova.

Following the US Open, Jabeur had left wrist surgery in November that kept her out for five months until April 2011.

The last two singles events of Jabeur's junior career were the 2011 French Open and the 2011 Wimbledon Championships.

At the French Open, she won her only junior Grand Slam title to become the first North African woman to win a junior Grand Slam tournament.

As the ninth seed, she upset top seed Daria Gavrilova in the quarterfinals, third seed Caroline Garcia in the semifinals, and then fifth seed Monica Puig in the final.

This title helped her rise to No. 4 in the world in the junior rankings.

After nearly a decade of playing primarily at the ITF level, she started competing more regularly on the WTA Tour in 2017.

She won the Arab Woman of the Year award in 2019.

At the 2020 Australian Open, Jabeur became the first Arab woman to reach a major quarterfinal, a feat she repeated at the 2021 Wimbledon Championships.

She also became the first Arab woman to win a WTA Tour title at the 2021 Birmingham Classic.

Jabeur won the 2022 Madrid Open, a WTA 1000 event, her biggest title, becoming the first female Tunisian and Arab player to win at this level.

Her achievements are credited with raising the profile of tennis across the African continent.

Ons Jabeur was born to Samira and Ridha Jabeur in Ksar Hellal, a small town in Tunisia.

She grew up in the larger nearby coastal town of Sousse.

Jabeur has two older brothers, Hatem and Marwen, and an older sister, Yasmine.

Her mother played tennis recreationally and introduced her to the sport at the age of three.

Jabeur trained under coach Nabil Mlika for ten years from ages four to thirteen, originally starting to work with him at a tennis promotion centre at her school.

When she was ten years old, her club did not have its own tennis courts and she could only train on courts at nearby hotels.

At twelve years old, Jabeur moved to the capital city of Tunis to train at the Lycée Sportif El Menzah, a national sport high school for the country's up-and-coming athletes, where she stayed for several years.

She also later trained in Belgium and France starting at the age of 16.

Jabeur credits her parents for the sacrifices they made while raising her, saying, "My parents sacrificed a lot of things – my mom used to drive me everywhere around Tunisia to go play the tournaments, and she encouraged me to go to a special school to study. That was a big sacrifice to see her little girl going for a dream that, honestly, wasn't 100% guaranteed. She believed in me and gave me the confidence to be there."