TENNIS in DEPTH.

Ana is on the cover of the new issue Australian Tennis Magazine. The 23-year-old is the subject of a feature entitled “Remodelling a champion” by journalist Barry Wood.

After a baffling two years in which she struggled to string consecutive wins together, former world No. 1 Ana Ivanovic looks set to return to top form in time for the Australian summer. She’s back, and it’s great to see. Ana Ivanovic, who ranks alongside Kim Clijsters as the most popular player on the WTA tour, has, it seems, put more than two years of a baffling mediocrity behind her and she is once again notching up the victories. She ended this season by winning 10 of her last 11 matches, claiming titles in Linz and Bali – an impressive turnaround by a player who, two years after winning the French Open and ascending to world No. 1, had seen her ranking sink to 65. She was, it seemed, going nowhere. There were the occasional decent tournaments, such as Brisbane, Rome and Cincinnati this year where she reached the semi-finals, but there were far more events where her results were disappointing.

Her decline was particularly painful to witness, because she is universally liked for her always-present smile and the same down-to-earth personality she had when she announced her arrival as a 16 year old back in 2004. It was then that, ranked 156, she qualified in Zurich and upset world No. 29 Tatiana Golovin by fighting back from 1-5 in the final set, saving match points, and then stretched Venus Williams by holding five set points in the opening set and three in the second before conceding in two tiebreaks. Eyebrows were raised and a star was born. With her model girl looks, as well as spectacular on-court talent, she went on to become one of the pin-ups of the game, and with her 2008 victory at Roland Garros the world was at her feet. But then, unexpectedly, the results stopped coming. At the US Open that year she lost to an opponent ranked 188, and although she won Linz a few weeks later she suffered an increasing number of early defeats. The worst moment, she says, came at the 2009 US Open when she fell to Kateryna Bondarenko. “It was the first time I had lost in the first round of a Grand Slam, and also I had a match point,” she said. “In my career, usually I was the one saving match points and going on to win. It was a very unpleasant experience, not using my opportunity. It took me a while to get over that one.”

 So what had gone wrong? “I got to number one and I thought, ‘This is great and I have to play even better to improve’, and I started changing my technique and the way I was working,” she said. “Obviously I was doing something right (to win Roland Garros and get to world No. 1) but I felt I could still improve. I got very motivated and excited and wanted to get better and improve those few little things. I thought I could get my volleys a little bit better, my serve more powerful, and you get consumed by that and I got carried away a little bit. “It wasn’t good because I had a certain rhythm and I lost that, and then a few injuries crept in and then you lose matches you expect to win. That was hard and I took it very personally and was very hard on myself and brought myself down.”

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