STANFORD, CALIF. — She was just 17, a shy, soft-spoken girl from Moscow with blonde locks straight out of a Brothers Grimm tale. She didn’t have much command of the English language. She didn’t have much command of her serve, either.
Elena Dementieva was in her first full year on the WTA Tour and on her way to cracking the top-100, but she was an outsider on the Taube Tennis Stadium’s makeshift hard-court in Stanford, California, where the underdog Russians were facing their American counterparts in the Fed Cup Final. She was an unknown commodity.
All that was about to change.
It was September 19, 1999, and the Billie Jean King-captained U.S. team — led by Lindsay Davenport and the Williams sisters (a cornrowed Serena was fresh off her first Slam win at the U.S. Open) — had already clinched its second World Group title in four years. But Dementieva was about to pull off the first top-10 win of her young career. Trailing 4-1 in the telltale third set against Venus Williams, she went toe-to-toe from the baseline with the then-world-No. 3 and rallied to score a 1-6, 6-3, 7-6(5) upset — the lone bright spot for Konstantin Bogoroditsky‘s side in an otherwise dreary 4-1 loss. It may have been a dead-rubber win, but Dementieva had sent a strong message: she had arrived, and she was here to stay.
On Wednesday night, Dementieva, now 28, was back on the Stanford campus, where, 11 years ago, it all began.
“That was the biggest match of my career,” reflected Dementieva, who looked rusty in her first match since Roland Garros but hung on to defeat Kimikio Date Krumm 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 in the first round of the Bank of the West Classic. “That was the first time I played against a top-10 player. I was able to win. That gave me a lot of confidence for the rest of my career, such a huge belief in myself. I wasn’t sure if I was going to play or not. They told me at the last moment that I was going to play against Venus. It was such a shock for me. It was 11 years ago, but I remember everything about that match.”
“I didn’t have any expectations of myself playing against her,” added Dementieva. “I was so excited to play against Venus. That was a huge moment.”
Of course, much has happened since that fateful win. There were the Roland Garros and U.S. Open finals of ’04; Russia’s Davis Cup triumph over France in ’05; two Olympic medals, including Beijing gold in ’08; and her career-high ranking of No. 3 in ’09. But Dementieva’s greatest accomplishment may just be her longevity. Until she sat out Wimbledon last month with a calf injury, she hadn’t missed a Slam since her debut at the ’99 Australian Open. That’s 42 straight Slams.
“It’s pretty amazing that I was able to play every single Slam,” she marveled. “It’s great to have that consistency my whole career, for more than 10 years. I was able to stay healthy over such a long period of time.”
