Claire Liu, the tennis player who wrote her way back to a first WTA title

Claire Liu

Photo: Hameltion / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 25, 2000 Thousand Oaks
Occupation	Tennis Player
Awards	Wimbledon girls' singles · Wimbledon girls' doubles · Hong Kong Open

For most of her professional life, Claire Liu has run two careers side by side. One plays out on court, often in qualifying draws watched by a handful of people. The other plays out in hotel rooms, on a Substack she calls Finding Claire-ity, where she writes with unusual candour about crying before matches and about the hope that winning might finally make her feel accepted. This month in Hong Kong the two stories reached the same place, and a former Wimbledon junior champion who had spent years doubting she would ever match her teenage self lifted her first trophy on the WTA Tour.

The doubt was never an affectation. Liu grew up in Thousand Oaks, in Southern California, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and was beating grown women before she was old enough to drive: she won her first professional title on clay at fourteen, the youngest player to do so since Anna Kournikova. Early success of that kind sets a measuring stick, and much of what came afterwards was held up against it.

Her junior peak came in 2017, the year she turned seventeen on May 25. A year after winning the Wimbledon girls’ doubles title with Usue Arconada, she lost the French Open girls’ final to Whitney Osuigwe, then returned to the All England Club and beat Ann Li on No. 1 Court, in an all-Asian-American final, for the girls’ singles title. She was the first American to win it since Chanda Rubin in 1992, and it took her to No. 1 in the junior rankings.

The professional climb was slower. Liu won her first match at a major at Wimbledon in 2018, then took the eventual champion, Angelique Kerber, to three sets. She broke into the top 100 in August 2021 after back-to-back ITF titles in Charlottesville and Charleston. In 2022 she won a WTA 125 event in Paris against Beatriz Haddad Maia, reached her first tour final in Rabat, where Martina Trevisan beat her 6-2, 6-1, and knocked out the top seed Ons Jabeur in Monastir for her first win over a top-10 player. In January 2023 she reached her career-high ranking of No. 52, and that spring she made the third round of the Miami Open and met Iga Świątek in the second round at Roland Garros.

That is the stretch a tidier biography would call the breakthrough, and Liu has spent a good deal of energy taking that version apart. “When I got to the top 100, I thought, ‘Oh, I made it,'” she told the Roland Garros website in May. “And then I got to the top 100 and I was like, I don’t feel like that at all. I still am crying, or freaking out before matches.” Her Grand Slam record told a harsher version of the same story: before Wimbledon this year she had entered 29 majors, 20 of them in the main draw, and lost in the first round 13 times without ever reaching a third round. The junior title on the Wimbledon honours board became less a credential than a reproach. “I’ve wished that my professional career could match, you know, what I did in the juniors,” she told the tennis writer Ben Rothenberg in July. The comparison was always the wrong one. Junior trophies are a poor predictor of professional careers, and the measure of hers was never going to be fixed at seventeen.

In 2024 the strain caught up with her. After Roland Garros she stopped, announcing in a post titled “gone girl” that she was stepping away from tennis, and spent the rest of the season on a break to look after her mental health. She came back in January 2025 and almost at once ended an eight-year partnership with her coach, Chris Tontz, a split she later described on her blog as the result of “circumstances that came as a shock to me and left me with no choice”. The year that followed was, in her own word, “tumultuous”, and by the summer her ranking had fallen outside the top 400. She kept writing through it: in June a post titled “Asian Invasion” catalogued the casual discrimination she had met in the sport, including being mistaken for other Asian players, and in December “The Year of Realizing Stuff” dealt with perfectionism. She saw several therapists; one subject of those sessions, she admitted, was the figure skater Alysa Liu, whose ability to separate results from happiness she found hard to believe. Around the 2025 US Open she began working with the coach Clemens Wagner, and in October, ranked No. 305, she beat Alexandra Eala in Guangzhou on the way to the semifinals.

The results came back in 2026. Liu started the season ranked No. 221. In May she won her first title in two years in Trnava, Slovakia, then came through qualifying at Roland Garros and reached the second round, where Maria Sakkari beat her. At Wimbledon, ranked No. 146 and with only one grass-court match behind her, she won three qualifying rounds and then beat Hanne Vandewinkel and Zeynep Sönmez to reach the third round of a major for the first time. It sent her back to No. 1 Court, nine years after her junior final, against Coco Gauff, who needed three sets to win 6-3, 6-7(5), 6-2. In September she added a second WTA 125 title in Barranquilla, beating Anna Blinkova in the final.

Hong Kong was where it added up. Ranked No. 102 and playing only her seventh main draw of the year, Liu beat Tatiana Prozorova, the eighth seed Katie Boulter, Sönmez again and the qualifier Alexandra Shubladze without dropping a set. In the final on November 8 she met Eala once more, now the second seed. Eala broke early; from 3-3, Liu won nine games in a row to take the title 6-3, 6-0, landing 88 percent of her first serves. She was the first to say the score flattered her. “She had chances, I think, in almost every single game. I don’t think the score shows the full story,” Liu said. The win lifted her to No. 69 on November 9, her highest ranking since September 2023.

“It couldn’t have been a better end to the year,” she said at the trophy ceremony, thanking her team “for sticking by me and grinding”. The new ranking should put her straight into the main draw of the Australian Open in January. At Wimbledon she joked that she might one day write a sequel to her old essay about why she hates Grand Slams. Melbourne may hand her the material.

Tags: sports, athletes, tennis players, Wimbledon, Coco Gauff, Roland Garros, Claire Liu, Hong Kong Open

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