Czech tennis player Marketa Vondrousova won the female singles at Wimbledon, becoming the first unseeded player to do so.

Vondrousova, who entered the tournament as no. 42 in the world rankings and is leaving it as no. 10, beat 4-seeded Tunisian player Ons Jabeur 6:4 and 6:4 on Saturday and went on to an emotional celebration with her family and friends, crying in a mixture of happiness and disbelief.

“It seems unbelievable to me,” she said in an interview with Czech Radio. “I came here telling myself I will see if I can win at least one round.” Vondrousova also became the lowest-ranking player to win Wimbledon since Venus Williams was ranked no. 31 when claiming the title in 2007.

Although unseeded at Wimbledon, Vondrousova is no stranger to major finals – she lost in the French Rolland Garros grand slam singles final in 2019 as well as in the final of the Tokyo Olympic women's singles tournament in 2020.

Vondrousova did not start the match well and had to come back from losing 0:3 to win the first set after quickly falling behind. She praised the “incredible” tennis performance her opponent put up and credited her past returning from injuries and the Rolland Garros finals experience for her resilience.   

“After I lost the final in Paris, I was quite sad,” she was quoted as saying by Czech Radio, explaining that “I did not want to make the same kind of mistake” and wanted to “celebrate with my close ones no matter what happens”.  She was accompanied in the Wimbledon finals by her husband, a former tennis prospect, and her father, sister and friends.

Vondrousova joined Petra Kvitova, the late Jana Novotna and Martina Navratilova in the list of Czech women Wimbledon winners. BBC noted that Czech female tennis players have performed strongly at grand slams in recent years, producing 9 singles finalists in the past 10 years, together with doubles champions and several wins in the team Fed Cup/Billie Jean King Cup tournaments.

In another astonishing story, Czech Barbora Strycova and Taiwanese Hsieh Su-wei claimed their second Wimbledon women’s doubles title on Sunday after Strycova returned from having a baby for her final Wimbledon tournament.   

“The Czech Republic is the greatest female tennis country we’ve ever seen!,” tweeted former tennis player and tennis coach Rennae Stubbs, listing “the amount of great players it’s produced” in the population of less than 11 million.

American-Czech Navratilova told BBC that “we have a great system” of clubs scattered across the country, “many [with] 2 or 4 courts […] where you can play practically for free, so its accessible.”

Navratilova was stripped of Czech citizenship in 1975 after she asked the United States for political asylum, emigrating from the stiff communist regime which gripped her native country following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Since 2008 she has been a dual citizen.  

Tennis is the only sport in Czechia which can rival the popularity of ice hockey and football. Like in tennis, Czechia has a fairly accessible country-wide ice-hockey rink infrastructure built largely under communism and has continued to produce some of the best players worldwide.