Ana Ivanovic

Ana Ivanovic started to play tennis when she was only 5, after being inspired by Monica Seles (by watching TV), also a Serbian player. It was a hard task for Ana who had to practice in the early morning in 1999 in order to avoid the NATO bombing and, during the winter time, she used to use a abandoned swimming pool, due to the lack of tennis facilities. She was first noticed by the tennis world when she reached the final of the 2004 Junior Wimbledon tournament, losing to Kateryna Bondarenko. The next tear, Ivanovic won her first career singles title, as a qualifier, in Canberra, Australia, (by defeating Melinda Czink in straight sets, 7-5, 6-1). That was a beginning of a string of successes; she defeated Svetlana Kuznetsova, Nadia Petrova, Vera Zvonareva the same year,all of them being WTA top 10 players by that time. She finished off 2006 as the 14th best ranked woman in the world. In 2007, her career continued to climb. She entered in the selected group of the top 5 world tennis players (she finished 4th just 14 points shy of Jeleba Jankovic). And as the winter of 2008, after losing the Australian Open final to Maria Sharapova, she claimed the second WTA spot. To note that she eliminated in the "quarters" Venus Williams. She was only 21 years old. In 2008, she became the first Serbian and third Yugoslav woman ever to win a Grand Slam singles title (the others being 'Mima Jausovec' and Monica Seles) when she won the French Open, defeating Dinara Safina in the final.