Zheng, who now lives in Barcelona, is forthcoming with reporters about her own journey but avoids talking about China.

目前定居巴塞罗那的郑钦文,对记者们直言不讳地讲述自己的职业历程,却回避谈论中国网球。

Qinwen Zheng was eleven years old in 2014, when China’s Li Na won the women’s singles championship at the Australian Open. Zheng has talked often about Li, who was something of a one-woman tennis wave in her home country. Not until tennis was reintroduced as an Olympic sport, in Seoul, in 1988, had there been much tennis at all in China. (Li’s first racquet sport was badminton.) But, like so many other Western things, it began to catch on there in the nineties, and its popularity grew in the new century. A Chinese team won the women’s gold medal in doubles at the 2004 Olympics, in Athens. Li’s rise brought tennis’s prominence to a whole other level. In 2011, she won the French Open, becoming the first Asian-born player, female or male, to win a Grand Slam. Three years later, tens of millions of television viewers in China watched her best Dominika Cibulková in that Australian Open final. Zheng was among them. “In that moment, I was still a child, and then she gave me a dream that, oh, the Asian player, the Chinese player, also can win a Grand Slam,” she recalled last year. By then, Zheng was in Wuhan, about two hundred and fifty miles from home, at a tennis academy, where she’d gone, in 2010, at her father’s urging, and where she lived for four years.

2014年,当中国选手李娜在澳大利亚网球公开赛上赢得女单冠军时,郑钦文11岁。郑经常谈起李娜,李娜在她的祖国曾掀起一波“一个女人的网球浪潮”(译者注:李娜放弃编制进入职业网球)。直到1988年首尔奥运会上,网球重新被列为奥运会比赛项目,中国才开始有了的网球运动。(李娜最初拿起球拍是打羽毛球)。但是,像许多其他西方舶来品一样,网球在90年代开始流行起来,并在新世纪变得越来越受欢迎。中国队在2004年雅典奥运会上获得了女子双打金牌。李娜的崛起将网球的重要性提升到了一个全新的高度。2011年,她赢得了法国网球公开赛(French Open),成为第一个在亚洲地区出生赢得大满贯(Grand Slam)的球员(无论男女)。三年后,数千万中国电视观众目睹了她在澳网决赛中击败多米尼卡·齐布尔科娃的生涯最佳表现。郑钦文就是其中之一。“那时,我还是个孩子,然后她给了我一个梦想,哦,亚洲球员,中国球员,也可以赢得大满贯,”她去年回忆道。那时,郑钦文在一所离家250英里(约400公里)的武汉的网球学院上学。2010年,在父亲的督促下,她去了那里,并在那里生活了四年。

As this year’s Australian Open gets under way this week, Zheng is widely considered to be among the most promising of the youngest players in the women’s game. (The only younger player ranked above her is Coco Gauff.) She is tall, at five feet ten; her topspin-lathered forehand is penetrating. She’s rangy and aggressive, and, when her first serve is on, it’s formidable—in her first-round match against Latvia’s Jelena Ostapenko at last summer’s U.S. Open, she struck twenty-one aces. She trains tirelessly and brims with confidence. She has, in sum, the makings of Li’s successor. Many people, not only in China but in the business of professional tennis, have been hoping and planning for a player like her ever since Li hoisted her major trophies a tennis generation ago. (Li, dogged by knee injuries, retired not long after her victory in Australia.) China was supposed to be where tennis would grow in the twenty-first century—where new events on the tour would be held, with Chinese companies sponsoring them lavishly; where racquets and sneakers would be sold in such numbers that the country would rival the U.S. as a market for tennis gear; where girls, especially, would take to tennis, with the best becoming stars of the game. (Boys were already crazy for basketball; there is just one Chinese player currently in the A.T.P. Top 100, Zhizhen Zhang, who is ranked No. 96.)

随着今年的澳大利亚网球公开赛拉开帷幕,郑钦文被广泛认为是女子网球中最有前途的年轻球员之一。(唯一高于她排名的年轻选手是可可·高夫(Coco Gauff))。她个子很高,有五英尺十英寸(178厘米);她的正手强力上旋球极具穿透力。她身材修长球风有侵略性。当她在站上赛场完成第一个发球开始,就会变得很可怕——在去年夏天的美网首轮对阵拉脱维亚选手耶琳娜·奥斯塔彭科(Jelena Ostapenko)时,她发出了21个Ace球(译者注:发球直接得分)。她不知疲倦地训练且充满信心。总之,她具备了李娜接班人的一切潜质。从李娜这一代运动员开始获得公开赛冠军以来,许多人,不仅是中国国内的人,还有职业网球圈的人,都一直希望并规划能像郑钦文这样的选手出现。(李娜因膝盖受伤,在澳网夺冠后不久就退役)。中国被认为是21世纪网球发展的沃土新的巡回赛事在中国举办,中国公司的赞助趋之若鹜;在中国,球拍和运动鞋的销量将达到足以与美国匹敌的网球装备市场;在中国,女孩子尤其喜欢网球,最优秀的会成为运动明星。(男孩们已经为篮球疯狂了;目前只有一名中国男选手进入了ATP前100名,那就是排名第96位的张之臻)。
原创翻译:龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


New élite tennis academies run by Western coaches opened in Chinese cities; sports-management agencies went to China in search of talent. (By the time she was a teen-ager, Zheng was being managed by IMG, which also represented Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams.) The Australian Open began branding itself as the Asia Slam, and worked to lure Chinese sponsors, tourists, and TV-rights deals. By 2019, tennis was estimated to be a four-billion-dollar business in China, second only to that in the United States, and growing at a faster rate. Zheng by then had moved from Wuhan to Beijing, where she was tutored by the Argentinean coach Carlos Rodríguez, who had worked with the Belgian star Justine Henin and, near the end of her career, Li Na. Ten W.T.A. tournaments were held in China in 2019, two more than in the United States. (There were men’s tournaments, too, in China, but fewer.) The W.T.A. Finals were held, for the first time, in Shenzhen, which had outbid a number of other cities worldwide and secured a ten-year deal to host the tournament. The tournament’s total prize money that year was fourteen million dollars, five million more than that of the A.T.P. men’s finals, held in London; the singles winner, Ashleigh Barty, earned $4.42 million, the most that any player had ever won at that point at a tennis tournament. It looked for all the world that China was undergoing the sort of boom that tennis hadn’t seen since the American fever for the game in the sixties and seventies.

在几个中国城市,西方教练开办多个精英网球学院;体育管理公司到中国寻找人才。(十几岁时,郑钦文的经纪公司是IMG,诺瓦克·德约科维奇(Novak Djokovic)和塞雷娜·威廉姆斯(Serena Williams)都曾是这家公司代理的球员)。澳网开始标榜自己为亚洲的大满贯赛事,并努力吸引中国赞助商、游客和电视转播权。到2019年,网球在中国的市值估计达到40亿美元,仅次于美国,而且增长速度更快。当时郑钦文已经从武汉搬到了北京,在那里接受阿根廷教练卡洛斯罗德里格斯(Carlos Rodríguez)的指导,卡洛斯曾与比利时网球明星贾斯汀·海宁(Justine Henin)(译者注:前女网世界第一)以及职业生涯接近尾声时的李娜合作过。2019年,中国举办了10场WTA(译者注:国际女子网球协会)锦标赛,比美国还多两场。(中国也有男子锦标赛,但数量较少)。WTA总决赛第一次在深圳举行,深圳在竞标中击败了世界上许多其他城市,获得了为期10年的赛事主办权。那年的锦标赛总奖金为1400万美元,比在伦敦举行的A.T.P.男子总决赛的奖金多500万美元;单打冠军阿什丽·巴蒂(Ashleigh Barty)获得了442万美元的奖金,这是当时网球锦标赛中获得奖金最多的选手。在全世界看来,中国正在经历一场自上世纪六七十年代美国网球热以来从未出现过的热潮。

原创翻译:龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处