'My country will be proud of me': Zheng Qinwen's Olympic gold is a boon for Chinese tennis (2024)

PARIS — It was only a matter of time for Chinese tennis, wasn’t it?

In the biggest win on a tennis court for the world’s most populous country since the glory days of Li Na, Zheng Qinwen won the gold medal for China at Roland Garros on Saturday afternoon.

Zheng, a 21-year-old rising star, took advantage of an erratic performance from Donna Vekic of Croatia to give China its first Olympic medal in singles, on the same court that Li notched her breakthrough win at the French Open, 13 years ago.

“I always wanted to be one of the players who can inspire young kids,” Zheng said with the gold medal hanging from her neck. She said the Olympics are the most important tournament in her country, even more important than the Grand Slams. Especially to her father, who pushed her into the sport when she was a small girl growing up in Shiyan, a city in northern China. Aged seven, Zheng went to Wuhan with her father to play in front of a coach. She impressed so much that she would stay there to train — alone.

“Now I can tell him I made history,” she said, beaming with the brightest of smiles.

It was a win that the Chinese who travelled to Paris for these Olympics and those who live here as part of the burgeoning diaspora were ready for.

Flags were everywhere in the crowd at Court Philippe-Chatrier, held aloft by fans who chanted Zheng’s name throughout the match as if she was the one who had grown up a few countries away. In a stadium known for its rowdy crowds during the French Open, the Chinese faithful did all they could to make Zheng feel as though she was playing at home.

Mission accomplished. Vekic produced just 10 winners compared with 30 unforced errors, a subjective and imperfect statistic, but regardless, that ratio will rarely lead to victory. Zheng wasn’t too much cleaner, with 13 winners and 20 unforced errors, but against Vekic on Saturday, it was good enough.

It is hard to overstate the impact for tennis, or really for any sport, of having a major star in a country of roughly 1.4 billion people and the world’s second largest economy. Yao Ming singlehandedly altered the finances of the NBA 20 years ago.

Judging from the crowd, Zheng has inspired far more people than just children and her father. When she is at her best, she flies across the court and swings the loosest of arms, ripping balls into the far corners of the court, her eyes wide, and beaming with energy.

Ever the ham, she’s also not afraid to indulge in some karaoke after a win on the tour, showing off an infectious personality.

“One of the brightest stars in the sport,” Novak Djokovic said of her ahead of the final.

For tennis, especially women’s tennis, Zheng’s star couldn’t rise at a better time. Li’s two Grand Slam titles, in 2011 and 2014, the latter at the Australian Open, blew China open for the sport. In 2019 the women’s tour, the WTA, began a 10-year deal to hold its season-ending championship in Shenzhen, with promised prize money of $14 million annually.

Then Peng Shuai happened.

In November of 2021, Peng, a star in doubles, accused Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier of China, of sexually assaulting her in social media posts that were quickly deleted.

The Chinese government removed all mentions of Peng’s accusation, and coverage of Peng from news media outside China was censored. She largely disappeared from public life. Steve Simon, the chief executive of the WTA went public with his frustration, demanding that he and the WTA be able to speak with Peng independently and that Chinese officials conduct a transparent investigation into her allegations.

If they did not comply, Simon said, the WTA would consider removing its nine tournaments from China, including the Tour Finals, moves that could cost women’s tennis tens and perhaps hundreds, of millions of dollars over the next decade. Simon then followed through on that threat, announcing that after weeks of failed attempts to communicate with Peng, and no sign of an investigation or evidence that Peng could speak freely, the WTA was immediately suspending all of its tournaments in China.

Peng largely dropped out of sight, appearing briefly during the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, but has remained largely silent ever since. The Chinese government refused to budge, and a year and a half later, when Simon announced that the boycott had failed, Chinese officials essentially canceled the contract to host the finals, putting the tour in financial peril.

Though the regular tour stops in the country have resumed, the sport’s relationship with China is still recovering.

Zheng’s victory should do plenty to repair any lingering damage; it will also reopen discussions about Peng’s decision to retire, announced in a highly controlled interview with French newspaper L’Equipe in 2022. Zheng nearly had her moment at the Australian Open in January, when she took advantage of a side of the draw that was decimated by upsets and surged into the final. But she ran into the defending champion Aryna Sabalenka and the Belarusian overwhelmed her.

Since then, Zheng has struggled to match her form of the Australian summer, though she got on a roll late last month and won a small tournament in Palermo, Italy on clay, which is her best surface.

She had a rough road in the Olympics, coming back from a set and a service break down in the third round and the quarterfinals against Emma Navarro and Angelique Kerber. In the semifinal, she managed a win widely considered impossible, beating Iga Swiatek, the world No. 1 and a clay savant who had lost just once at Roland Garros since 2019. Swiatek had beaten Zheng six times, but Zheng set aside her fears and told herself that she would fight for three hours or more if that’s what it would take to beat Swiatek.

It took far less than that, as she won 6-2, 7-5, coming back from a 0-4 deficit in the second set, when Swiatek looked like she was turning the match around.

Heading into the final, Zheng said she had none of the nerves that made her legs heavy before she faced Sabalenka in Australia. Her mind was clear and confident. She believed she had more shots than Vekic, and more importantly, a “mental strength” she did not have six months ago.

An hour-and-a-half later, she climbed to the top step of the podium. With Vekic standing below her to her right and Swiatek, the bronze medal winner, below her on her left, Zheng gazed up at her rising flag as the anthem played.

When it was over, she put her gold medal in her mouth and took a bite.

(Top photo: RvS.Media/Monika Majer/Getty Images)

Matthew Futterman is an award-winning veteran sports journalist and the author of two books, “Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed” and “Players: How Sports Became a Business.”Before coming to The Athletic in 2023, he worked for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Star-Ledger of New Jersey and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is currently writing a book about tennis, "The Cruelest Game: Agony, Ecstasy and Near Death Experiences on the Pro Tennis Tour," to be published by Doubleday in 2026. Follow Matthew on Twitter @mattfutterman