The New Yorker:

The player known as Queenwen won Olympic Gold, and is breezing through the early rounds of the U.S. Open.

By Louisa Thomas

There 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.

The challenge, she said on the eve of the U.S. Open, was to keep the motivation. In January, Zheng had made the final of the Australian Open, but had been overwhelmed by Aryna Sabalenka, and then had failed to make it past the round of sixteen in eight of her next ten tournaments. After the Olympics, she wanted to cultivate consistency and mental fortitude. The athleticism was not in question: Zheng is tall, quick, and strong, with a powerful heavy-topspin forehand. What she really needed was to make some serves. Zheng has a hitch in her toss, which stands out like a beauty mark: it only exaggerates the elegance of her service motion. When Zheng makes her first serves, they are almost untouchable. The problem is that she misses them a lot—and her second serve is worse than most. In her first two matches in New York, she dropped the first set, largely thanks to erratic serving. Both times, she won the next two sets by making dramatically more first serves. In the second round, a win over Erika Andreeva, she had twenty aces.

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