Going by the rankings, Zheng was a surprise winner. Going by her hunger to bring gold to China, it wasn’t a shock at all.
If you look at rankings and recent history, Zheng Qinwen qualifies as a surprise gold medalist. The honor was supposed to go to top seed Iga Swiatek, who came to Roland Garros with a 35-2 record and three straight titles at that site.
But if we look at the desire of the players to win, Zheng’s title run in Paris shouldn’t come as a shock at all.
“I think I will fight until I die,” Zheng told WTA Insider as the Games were getting underway. “If I have to break down my body, I will do it because it’s once every four years. I will give everything for the Olympic Games.”
Soon after making that statement, she won her first-round-match over former Top Tenner Sara Errani 6-0, 6-0. Maybe we should have suspected that Zheng was on her way to becoming the first Chinese tennis player to strike gold in singles.
In the end, Zheng didn’t need to break her body down to do it. But she was pushed to the limits, mentally and physically, on more than one occasion. In the third round, she saved a match point to beat Emma Navarro. In the quarterfinals, she barely edged Angelique Kerber, 8-6 in a third-set tiebreaker. In the semis, she came back from an 0-4 deficit in the second set to pull off the upset of the tournament, over Swiatek.
Which brought her to Saturday’s gold-medal match with an even more surprising finalist, Donna Vekic. Maybe the biggest question as the match began was who would hold up better under the type of big-stage pressure that neither of them had felt much before. Vekic, 28, had never played a major final, while Zheng, 21, had been to one, at the Australian Open earlier this year, and hadn’t fared well. Aryna Sabalenka made her look like the Slam-final rookie she was in a 6-3, 6-2 win.
Who would keep it together better on Chatrier? We didn’t have to wait long to get our answer. By the second game, Vekic had made five errors and been broken. By the third game, she was down 0-3. Zheng wasn’t perfect either, but she showed that she could save break points with her serve, and get the ball out of Vekic’s strike zone with her heavy topspin. Vekic’s shaky start turned the match into an uphill struggle, one that she never quite climbed her way out of.
The battle of the forehands was always going to be crucial. It’s the best shot for both players, and they both follow the teachings of the modern game and try to hit it as often as possible. Vekic’s only hope, really, was to drive her relatively flat forehand into the corners. But it was Zheng’s safer, more topspin-heavy version of the shot that won out. She hit 11 winners with it, and continually rushed Vekic with her high-kicking spin. Along the way, Zheng showed off some deft touch at net, saving a break point at 4-2 in the first set with a trickier-than-it-looked drop volley.
The Croatian had won half a dozen tough matches over the past month, including one over Marta Kostyuk in the quarters, 10-8 in a third-set tiebreaker. But on Saturday her serve—she made just 47 percent of her first deliveries—and her forehand kept her from mounting a comeback. She could never get on top of the rallies, and ended up chucking her racquet to the court in frustration late in the second set. Instead of driving her forehand deep, she sent a couple routine, and crucial, ones into the net.
“The last point, you know, I’m really nervous, my hand is shaking,” Zheng told NBC afterward. “Every match my body is shaking.”
“I never felt so hungry,” she said of her desire to bring a gold back to her Olympic-loving country.
“I beat the pressure,” she said. “I beat the limit to myself.”
The sky, or somewhere close, has always seemed to be the limit for Zheng. Her mix of physicality and smooth ball-striking allows her to compete with anyone. Over the past year, working with coach Pere Riba, she says she has begun to deploy her talents more effectively and intelligently. What has been missing so far are consistent results. After reaching the final in Melbourne this year, Zheng didn’t make another semi until Palermo, just before the Games. The Olympics, obviously, were in her sights.
Will a Grand Slam title soon be in her sights as well? Recent Olympic history says: Possibly not. The last two Olympic gold winners, Monica Puig and Belinda Bencic, failed to take the next step up.
But neither Puig nor Bencic were blessed with the blend of youth and top-tier talent that Zheng has. She says that now she knows she can withstand any level of pressure, and that when she’s in trouble in a match in the future, she’ll think back to this win and it will “cheer me up,” Just as important, she also knows she can beat Swiatek; Zheng was 0-6 against her coming to Paris.
For now, Zheng will be happy with a first singles gold for China. Doing that might even be a bigger deal to her than winning a Slam title. She was willing to die for it, after all.
“It means everything,” Zheng said when the goal was reached. “Since I was a little kid I wanted to win a gold medal for my country—maybe not gold, just medal.”
“I feel so happy to create history. This feeling? Unbelievable.”
