Kim Clijsters Tennis Career

Clijsters was an accomplished junior player. In 1998, she was the runner-up in the Wimbledon junior singles event. She also won the French Open junior doubles event with Jelena Dokic and the US Open junior doubles event with Eva Dyrberg, and finished the year ranked number 11 in singles and number 4 in doubles in the ITF junior world rankings.

In 1999, Clijsters made the breakthrough into the senior ranks of women's tennis. At Wimbledon, she played through the qualifying rounds to make the main draw and beat Amanda Coetzer en route to the fourth round, where she lost to her childhood idol Steffi Graf. Later that summer, Clijsters reached the third round of the US Open, where at one stage she served for the match against, but ultimately lost to, the eventual champion Serena Williams. In the autumn of 1999, Clijsters won her first WTA singles title at Luxembourg, and then her first WTA doubles title at Bratislava, partnering with Laurence Courtois.

She climbed her way up the rankings over the next couple of years. She reached her first Grand Slam final at the 2001 French Open, where she lost an extremely close match to Jennifer Capriati by a score of 12-10 in the final set. Her next important breakthrough came at the end of 2002, when she won the year-end WTA Tour Championships in Los Angeles, scoring a huge win in the final over the world number one at the time, Serena Williams.

Clijsters had the most successful year of her career so far in 2003. She won nine tournaments that year, including the WTA championships, reached two Grand Slam finals at the French Open and the US Open, losing on both occasions to her compatriot Justine Henin-Hardenne, and was ranked number one in the world for several weeks, although she eventually finished the season at number two behind Henin-Hardenne.

Clijsters started 2004 by reaching her fourth Grand Slam final at the Australian Open, where she lost again to Henin-Hardenne; and then went on a very successful run where she won two titles at the Paris and Antwerp. Unfortunately, Clijsters then began to have injury problems with her wrist, which eventually required surgery and forced her to withdraw from the rest of the 2004 Grand Slam tournaments.

In February 2005, after almost a year of inactivity caused by injuries, she made her return to the WTA tour by participating in her home country tournament at Antwerp. She then completed a stunning comeback to the top echelon of tennis when she won, as an unseeded player, 14 straight matches against world's top players to claim two Tier I titles (Indian Wells and Miami) in March, 2005. Golf poker Scuba