Caroline Wozniacki: A great Dane
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Caroline Wozniacki does things in a hurry. At the start of 2007, aged just 16, she set herself the goal of breaking into the women’s top 100. She began the year at No.237 and had crossed that off her ‘to do’ list a few days after her 17th birthday in July. She started 2008 ranked No.60 so said to herself, ‘this year is about cracking the top 50’. By the end of January, after reaching the fourth round of the Australian Open, she’d done that too. In fact, she’s climbing the rankings so quickly that she barely qualifies as the subject of a Tennishead Hot Stuff feature, the bit of the website where we take a look at the tour’s Next Big Things. Heck, if writing this takes too long, lunchtime will have come and gone and she’ll have stormed her way into the top 20 – on a Tuesday!
Everyone knows me in Denmark now… It feels good.
The attractive blonde right-hander from Odense (birthplace of another famous Danish export, Hans Christian Andersen) began turning heads when she started winning international junior events for fun. After picking up the Orange Bowl title (the unofficial junior world championships) at the end of 2005, she reached the final of the 2006 Aussie Open girls’ singles aged just 15 a few weeks later and a few days before her 16th birthday (against girls mostly two years older) she was crowned Junior Wimbledon champion.
The astonishing thing about Wozniacki is how easily she has adapted to life on the senior tour. She was winning matches – and professional tournaments – long before she embarked on her first full year on the women’s tour in 2007. In 2006 (the same year she won Junior Wimbledon) she made the last eight of a WTA Tier 4 event on home soil in Copenhagen and won her first women’s title, a $25,000 Challenger in Istanbul.
Her 2007 season just got better. With a ranking too low to gain direct acceptance at her first tournament of the year, a $75,000 event in Italy, she promptly won three qualifying matches before five main draw scalps earned her a first $75K title. A couple of months later, in Las Vegas, she’d bagged another before a runners-up spot at a $50,000 event in Italy. After first round wins at Wimbledon and at the US Open, she made her first major WTA breakthrough when she reached her first main draw semi-final in Tokyo. Then came her run to the last 16 in Melbourne where she used her intelligent game to push eventual runner-up Ana Ivanovic to a second set tie-break, before going down 6-1, 7-6. She was rewarded with a ranking of No.45 the following Monday, her goal for 2008 all wrapped up before February had even arrived.
“I just saw it as an opportunity to show the world who I am, that I can play,” Wozniacki tells Tennishead casually, like taking the women’s tour by storm as a teenager is no big deal. “I had to start from the beginning again, and I really found that fun to just go out and think that every match I win is a big plus. If I lost a match it was fine, and if I won it was great, so step-by-step I came up the rankings.”
As well as her refreshingly relaxed approach to playing tennis, she’s proved that she also has the weapons and mental toughness to rely on when the opportunities come along in big matches. “Senior players are more consistent and hit harder, but think a bit better than the juniors,” she explains. “They take the first opportunity that they have, not the second or third; if they have one chance they take it. I think mentally I’m pretty sharp. I don’t give up.”
That winning mentality is probably in her genes. With her dad, Piotr, a Pole who played pro football in Denmark, mum Anna who played volleyball for Poland and an older brother, Patrik, who’s an amateur footballer back home in Denmark she grew up in a pretty competitive environment, something that used to surface when she played soccer herself as a kid. “I’m really competitive so if I’m not better than the others I don’t want to play any more,” she says matter of factly. Her father has had a hand in her tennis since she began playing aged seven and her parents still travel on the tour, accompanied by recent addition to her entourage, Swedish coach Henrik Holm, a former top 20 player himself who is employed by the Danish tennis federation. Internet rumours in February suggested Jimmy Connors was being lined up to help with her game too.
“I did all different kinds of sports [when I was younger]… I don’t think there’s a sport that I haven’t tried!” she admits. “And then suddenly I played tennis a little bit, and no one wanted to play with me because I was too bad.
“I just wanted to show the whole world that I wasn’t bad. I was playing against the wall for hours each day and I thought it was fun. And then one day my dad took me on the court and he wanted to practice with me and that’s how it started. And I got better than my parents, better than my brother, and I made some small goals and I achieved them and I wanted to become better and better.”
As well as improving her singles ranking, the teenager says she is determined to make sure she makes her Olympic debut in 2008 when the Games visit Beijing in August. “It’s a main goal for me because the Olympics is only every fourth year, and it’s a great achievement to go there and play and fight for some medals.”
Success at the Olympics would guarantee her serious superstar status back home in Denmark. Even before her Australian Open exploits, the Danes were talking about her becoming their biggest sports star of all time – no mean feat in a football-obsessed country that has churned out greats such as Michael and Brian Laudrup, legendary goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel, as well as Tour de France cyclists Bjarne Riis and Michael Rasmussen.
Major sponsors haven’t been slow in recognising her appeal. The logos of Babolat, adidas, Danish financial services group Nordea, JBJ Group, Sony Ericsson and Danish travel insurance company Europæiske Rejseforsikring A/S adorn her personal website, she’s already appeared on talk shows back home and has shot two TV commercials for Sony Ericsson and Europæiske.
Is she bothered by the attention? Not a bit. “Everyone knows me in Denmark now. If I go outside the door everyone wants autographs and are talking, but I like it – it’s fun. It feels good.”
Like any authentic sports superstar, she now lives in Monte Carlo, having moved to the, ahem, tax-free principality in January 2007. It’s obvious Denmark is still close to her heart, though, (“It’s beautiful, with nice people,” she says, but “a little bit too rainy”) and confesses that being the only Dane on the WTA tour gets lonely at times.
“Sometimes it is, we have some guys that are playing, but no girls, and so it is hard because you want to compete with someone positively and you want to have someone to talk to as well… [I miss] some of my friends that are at home, and my brother who is there and playing soccer, and I miss the atmosphere.”
Maintaining contact with all things Denmark is helped by the fact that Caroline is still a student, dedicated to completing her schoolwork by mixing tennis with long distance learning. “It’s important to get an education in case something happens,” she explains. It’s a mature approach to life for a 17-year-old, but something tells us she won’t be needing her geography, history or algebra any time soon.
Someone who knows a thing or two about being a teenage prodigy, Martina Hingis, feels the same – and expects big things. “Caroline is a strong up and coming player with a lot of potential,” she said last year. “She just needs to keep on going with what she’s doing. She’s going in the right direction. I think she is very talented and can go a long way.”
Tennishead says: Watch out for Wozniacki!
YouTube Video Clips
Danish TV documentary, Pt 1
Danish TV documentary, Pt 2
Sony Ericsson commercial
Eurosport interview
Danish TV interview
Web links
Caroline Wozniacki personal website
