Building Champions

Featuring a foreword by Billie Jean King.
Tennis is one of the only worldwide sports in which women have consistently played on the same stage as men for the past 50 years. The environment has allowed the women's game to create its own culture and narrative. While the men's headlines have been grabbed by the Big Three of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, on the women's side shocks have emerged regularly and variety has reigned. Once the game was defined by heavyweight rivalries - from Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova in the 1980s to Steffi Graf and Monica Seles in the 90s, before the turn of the century brought the Williams sisters. Even in the midst of the Serena Williams dominance, there have been a succession of bolt-from-the-blue champions to create a sense of unpredictability and drama unrivalled in elite sport.
Since 2000, 36 different women have lifted grand slam singles trophies. Only 22 men have. In the last decade alone, there have been 10 female one-slam wonders, compared to four males. What is most striking about these numbers, is that they are not all serve bots or baseline bruisers hailing from the tennis academy system. Instead, the origin stories of these stars differ considerably. A generation of Czech talent eclipsing the richest tennis nations; child prodigies like Coco Gauff modelled by her parents; Kim Clijsters defying the odds to become a comeback champion after giving birth; and Emma Raducanu crafting a coaching rotation system to achieve her fairytale in New York.
Building Champions explores the complex, remarkable stories of winning players from across the globe and asks what this generation can tell us about the future of women's tennis.

Molly McElwee is a freelance sports journalist writing about women's sport, football, tennis, Olympic and Paralympic sport. Molly spent more than five years as a sportswriter for the Daily Telegraph, with a key focus on women's sports and tennis. She has covered major championships at Wimbledon, Roland Garros and in New York as well as the 2019 Women's World Cup, the 2020 Paralympics in Tokyo and the 2024 Olympics in Paris. In 2024, Molly won the Tom Perrotta Prize, awarded by the International Tennis Writers' Association (ITWA) to a writer aged 35 or under who shows excellence in tennis journalism.