Svetlana Kuznetsova

The Sony Ericsson WTA Tour rankings do not lie: there are five Russians in the top ten, two Serbs and a Slovakian, with no western Europeans, no Australians, and only Venus and Serena Williams, placed sixth and seventh, flying the Stars and Stripes.

The old order is not changing in women's tennis, it has changed. And unless one of the Williams sisters prevails again at Wimbledon, the odds are that the champion's name will end in a vowel, or an -ic. Ana Ivanovic and Jelena Jankovic, currently ranked first and second in the world, might have raised the curtain on a new Serb-dominated era - the seven-year -ic, if you like - but those five Russians will not easily yield their places at the top table, nor will those behind them in the rankings rest until they get there, and Svetlana Kuznetsova, the world number four and 2004 US Open champion, tells me why.

Svetlana Kuznetsova
Svetlana Kuznetsova
Svetlana Kuznetsova“We look at other countries and they have it so easy,” she says. “In Britain, the first girl who hits two balls in, they give her everything. In Russia, to be a star you have to be in the top ten. Nobody knows you if you are not, so your goals must always be very high. I was talking to Maria Kirilenko (ranked 19th in the world) about this. She used to take the train and then the metro for three hours to practice. Then she'd hit for two hours and travel three hours home. My family didn't have much money either, maybe $300 a month. In the winter in Russia I played inside a balloon but it was zero degrees, and we couldn't afford to heat it. There was no money, no budget, only your family were helping you. It is still the same. If you go to a junior tournament in Russia, the Russian girls are so focused. In England it is completely different. It's like a holiday for them.”
Svetlana Kuznetsova
Svetlana Kuznetsova
Svetlana Kuznetsova
Svetlana KuznetsovaWe meet on the players' terrace at the Qatar Telecom German Open, where she is destined to exit in the third round. At Roland Garros a few weeks later, she cruised through to the semi-final, but was well-beaten by her compatriot Dinara Safina. This week, top-seeded on grass in the Eastbourne International Women's Open, she was surprisingly knocked out in the second round, by the rising star from Denmark, Caroline Wozniacki. None of this augurs well for Wimbledon, where Kuznetsova, this year's fourth seed, has never got past the quarter-finals. But she is a Russian, and Russians, as we know, are made of unperishable stuff. Moreover, she comes from unusually driven stock. Her father, Alexandr Kuznetsov, is one of the world's top cycling coaches, and among his star pupils was her mother, Galina Tsareva, six times world champion and holder of 20 world track records. Her older brother Nikolai was a silver medallist in the team pursuit at the 1996 Olympic Games. She was born to compete.

But on a bike, not on a tennis court. “My dad was very strict coach,” she says, by way of explanation. “He doesn't want his guys to get involved in any relationships when they cycle, so he chose to train men only. When I started to grow up he had to decide whether to open his women's group again for me, but he said no, do something else. He made a joke. He said tennis earns more money. It was a joke because money never mattered to him, only results.”