When you’ve got it, why not flaunt it?
Diede de Groot has the Twitter handle “Diedethegreat”. It’s a bold claim but the 27-year-old Dutch wheelchair star is just that; an all-time great.
Take a look at the stats. De Groot has not lost a singles match since February 2021. In Grand Slams, she’s unbeaten since the 2020 French Open.
DRAWS: Australian Open 2024 wheelchair events
But that’s just the start of it. De Groot has won 13 straight Grand Slam singles titles, completing the calendar-year Grand Slam three years in a row. She has won 37 slam titles in all, including 20 in singles and, should she make it 21 here this week, De Groot will equal the record held by another Dutch legend, Esther Vergeer, who retired in 2013.
To speak to De Groot, though, you wouldn’t immediately know she is a superstar. Softly spoken and incredibly modest, she talks about focusing on the next goal, rather than discussing records or where she stands in history.
“I always like to say that I don't really keep track of the numbers,” she said after winning last year’s US Open. “I'd like to really not worry about it too much, because then you're going to start to think about, oh, I want to reach this, or I want to reach that.
“I really just want to focus on my game, and that's what I did today. I think just being this consistent is what I'm really proud of. Being able to do it multiple times in the year.
“I don't even have a goal to never lose; that's a really strange goal to have that, but…I think about myself, what do I have to do, where can I find the key points, and I think because I focus on them so well, I manage to win.”
De Groot is the latest in a line of Dutch champions. The most famous of all was Vergeer, who won 21 Grand Slam singles titles and would have won many, many more had she played in an era when all four slams held wheelchair events.
Remarkably, De Groot was born in the same town, Woerden, in the Netherlands, as Vergeer, and Jisek Griffioen, who bridged the gap between Vergeer and De Groot, winning four slam singles titles and becoming world No 1.
The Dutch system, which allowed wheelchair tennis to integrate with able-bodied players, has been incredibly successful and De Groot is starting to encroach on some of Vergeer’s numbers, although her 470-match unbeaten streak will surely never be beaten.
De Groot has now won 131 straight matches but she is well aware that she can lose, not least since she almost did in the warm-up event in Melbourne last week, when she was trailing Yui Kamiji 5-1 in the final set and facing match point.
At 5-1 down, I played this one game when I was like, ‘OK, you know what, this is going to be it; it’s OK if I lose today,” she told the ITF website.
“So I played a game where it was just ‘give it your all now’. And I won that game and that gave me a little [bit] of hope where I thought ‘maybe I can have another game and then maybe I can try and get another game’ and that’s how I tried to do it.
“I still don’t know how, but I managed it and it’s now on to the Australian Open, which I’m very happy about – that’s the tournament I’m here for.”
Finding ways to win even when they’re not playing their best is what champions do.