In 1999, when Li Na made her professional debut, the WTA Tour did not have an event in China and only six in Asia, three of them in Japan and the others in Uzbekistan, Malaysia and Thailand.
This year, China sits at the top of the list of host nations on the WTA Tour calendar with eight events, including this week’s Wuhan Open in Li’s hometown.
If you include Hong Kong and Chinese Taipei, the number of events is 10, two more than in the United States.
In Asia, the number of WTA Tour events has increased to 22, with Singapore to host the season-ending championship for the next five years.
Li, who announced her retirement on Friday because of chronic knee injuries, can take most of the credit for this pivot towards Asia.
“Li is the most influential player this decade for the growth of women’s tennis,” Stacey Allaster, the chief executive of the WTA, said in February, after the Chinese superstar won her second grand slam title at the Australian Open.
Her first grand slam title success and the first for an Asian man or woman, came in 2011 at the French Open.
A record 116 million viewers from China – about one in every 10 Chinese – tuned in to watch Li overcome the defending champion Francesca Schiavone in the final.
That year, the WTA had only two events in China, but they were desperately looking to increase their presence in the world’s most-populated country, home to the globe’s No 2 economy.
Li’s success provided them with that opportunity.
“She is a pioneer who opened doors to tennis for hundreds of millions of people throughout China and Asia,” Allaster said last week, after Li had announced her retirement.
Li has more than 23 million followers on the Chinese micro-blogging website Wiebo, an indication of how she has changed the landscape of tennis in China.
In 1988, when tennis made a return to the Olympics, about a million were playing the sport in the country. That number now stands at more than 14 million, double what it was five years ago.
The country boasts 30,000 tennis courts for what is the third-most-popular television sport in China. The government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on tennis facilities and development programmes around the country.
Li, who was listed among the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine last year, is proud of the “contributions” she has made towards the growth of tennis in China.
“In 2008, there were two professional women’s tennis tournaments in China, and today there are 10,” she said in her retirement letter. “That, to me, is extraordinary.”
That will be her legacy.
A late bloomer, Li might not have been the most consistent performer on the court but, as Allaster said, her contributions “will be seen for decades to come in China, throughout Asia and the rest of the world”.
arizvi@thenational.ae
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