The year 2013 has been the year of “the streak.”
The Chicago Blackhawks went 24 games without losing in regulation time to start the season, the Saskatoon Blades of the Western Hockey League had an 18-game winning streak, and the Miami Heat have won 26 straight games as of print.
As great as those streaks are, there was one streak that dwarfed them all, and it ended without having been broken.
On Feb. 12, 31-year-old Dutch wheelchair tennis player Esther Vergeer announced her retirement on Twitter, the same day of the release of her autobiography, Kracht & Kwetsbaarheid (“Power & Vulnerability”). A true koningin on the court, Vergeer’s career outshines all other tennis players, able-bodied included.
She was the number-one female singles wheelchair tennis player for 668 weeks. She has won 305 tournaments including 44 Grand Slam titles and seven Paralympic gold medals in both singles and doubles. Her singles record is 700-25 and while players such as Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and the Williams sisters have winning percentages around 80 per cent in singles, Vergeer’s is 96.6 per cent.
But the hallmark of her career is her almost unimaginable 470-match winning streak in singles, which only ended on her retirement.
It is not a misprint: 470.
Her last loss was against Australia’s Daniela di Toro on Jan. 30, 2003. Since then, 73 different players have tried to stop the streak, all of them unsuccessful. In 120 straight tournament wins, she only lost 18 sets in total. Of those 470 wins, 95 of them were double bagels (scores of 6-0, 6-0). This means, around one out of every five matches, she did not give up a single game in a match. In the gold medal match of the 2008 Paralympics, Vergeer faced her only match point in the streak against Dutch player Korie Homan.
More than Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps, she was the most dominant athlete on Earth.
After spinal cord surgery left her paralyzed at the age of eight, Vergeer took up sports, especially wheelchair tennis and basketball. While starting her professional tennis career, she was also a member of the Dutch national women’s wheelchair basketball team and won a European championship in 1997. However, Vergeer decided to concentrate on tennis full-time a year later.
Vergeer played her first ITF tournament in 1995 and won her first tournament a year later. In 1999, Vergeer became the number-one ranked female in wheelchair tennis and while she later dropped in the rankings, she regained it a year later and kept it for over 12 years. Her loss to di Toro was the only one in the final 560 singles matches of her career. She has won two Laureus Sports Awards as Sportsperson of the Year with a Disability in 2002 and 2008.
Vergeer’s accomplishments were forgotten in the mainstream sports world, despite her reputation within the tennis world. But she gained attention in 2010 for becoming the first disabled athlete featured in ESPN The Magazine’s annual Body Issue. On the cover, she posed nude in her chair covered up by a tennis racquet. While Vergeer had been the face of her sport for years, it was finally shown to a wider audience.
After winning two Paralympic gold medals last September, Vergeer took a break from tennis and it turned out to be the final tournament of her career. She will continue her work with the Johan Cruyff Foundation to promote the sport worldwide.
Her career has ended, but the streak will live on as one of the greatest feats in the history of sports. Streaks are fun to watch, in bothextension and cessation. The amount of pressure in keeping the streak alive as well as playing at a high level can be overwhelming, both physically and mentally. But all it has done is show the world Vergeer’s dominance and her physical and mental fortitude.
Federer, who wrote the foreword in Vergeer’s autobiography, told CNN in 2010: “Obviously there is also an argument that she is one of the greatest athletes in the world at the moment.”
It is possible she is one of the greatest athletes of all time.
