Jelena Ostapenko returns to the French open a hero at home in Latvia

By November, her home club, Enri, had inaugurated a new indoor facility named “A. Ostapenko Halle” with her own reserved practice court. (She prefers to be called Alona instead of Jelena, her given name.)

The club also has installed a multimedia exhibit dedicated to her still-brief career, complete with a teddy bear won at the Wimbledon junior tournament, a congratulatory letter from Latvia’s president, her French Open trophy and a video screen that shows in a continuous loop the broadcast of her upset victory over Simona Halep in the final in Paris.

Over the top? Perhaps. But then again, no Latvian tennis club has ever had a member quite like Ostapenko, the first Grand Slam singles champion in the Baltic nation’s turbulent history.

“It feels cool,” Ostapenko said as she led a tour of the facility last month. “Especially when you drive from the airport to Riga and on the right side you see the club and my name.”

Ostapenko won the French Open by repeatedly going for broke with her returns and groundstrokes, whether she was firmly planted in the red clay or stretched out wide with very little margin for error.

“It’s not percentage tennis, but it worked, and I hope it will work again sometime,” said Anastasija Sevastova, her Latvian compatriot and Fed Cup teammate. “She plays how she is in life. She’s so confident. She knows she will make it. That’s why she won a Grand Slam.”

With about 2 million inhabitants, Latvia has a smaller population than Connecticut or Albania. But in women’s tennis, it is making a mockery of the demographics, and at least for the moment it has more top 20 players than Spain, France, Australia, China or Russia.

Ostapenko is ranked fifth as she prepares to defend her title — and a lot of computer points — in Paris this week. The more artful, less forceful Sevastova — a 28-year-old master of the drop shot — is ranked 20th and reached the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open in 2016 and 2017.

Ernests Gulbis, a wildly unpredictable talent, was the first Latvian player to make a mark in the 2000s by breaking into the men’s top 10 briefly in 2014 after reaching the French Open semifinals with Ostapenko watching from his box.

But it is the Latvian women who have made the deeper impression. Ostapenko is arguably the second-most prominent active athlete in the country behind Kristaps Porzingis, the 7-foot-3 New York Knicks star who is 22.

Both like to drive fast, which can be problematic in a country where speed limits are low (50 kilometers, or about 31 miles, per hour, in urban areas; 90 kph, about 56 mph, on highways). According to Latvian news media reports, Porzingis had his driver’s license suspended last year for speeding. Ostapenko is well aware of the risks but is fighting daily temptation as she zooms around Riga in her blue Porsche Macan.

“The police are behind meeee,” she shouted, scanning her rearview mirror as she gave two visitors a tour of the capital between appointments. “The police are OK with the athletes, but look what happened to Porzingis. He was driving like 200 something, and he was very bad with the police. If you do something bad, you have to say you did it. If they come and you are like, ‘Do you know who I am?,’ they are going to just take everything from you.

“Once, there was huge traffic, and I did something I was not supposed to do, and they of course stopped me. And I said, ‘Yeah, I was wrong. I’m in a rush, and I have to go to practice.’ And they said, ‘Go, but don’t do it again.’ But I honestly was in a rush.”

That appears to be Ostapenko’s default mode on or off the court. There is more than a little Monica Seles in her grip-it-and-rip-it baseline style, and there is more than a little Martina Hingis in her frankness, preternatural self-assurance and varied interests beyond tennis (Hingis rode horseback and skied).

“I’m the person who always needs to do something,” Ostapenko said. “It’s not like nervous energy. It’s just like because I think when I was younger I didn’t have so much free time, and I got so used to having everything planned and everything was so close in timing, so I finish something and in 30 minutes I have another practice or another math lesson. So I get bored if there’s no plan, and I’m just sitting around.”

— Different Looks

On this particular Thursday, shortly after returning to Riga after reaching the final of the Miami Open, she was taking a short break from tennis but still shuttling between boxing and ballroom dancing practices in different parts of the city.

Boxing is a new interest, and not just because it provides fine cardio training for her regular job.

“It’s only my fourth time, but it’s fun to do something different,” she said before donning high-top shoes, shorts and red gloves. She then worked out for an hour, taking no blows from her coach but still flinching when he feigned the start of a roundhouse punch. Her wide-eyed look — Ostapenko is as expressive in a ring as she is in a tennis stadium — sparked a round of laughter from her sizable entourage.

“It’s really scary sometimes,” Ostapenko said of her newest sport. (Golf is next.)

Less than an hour later, after taking a wrong turn or two at the wheel and demonstrating her fluency in English expletives, she was changing into a black and red lace dress and high heels to dance with her partner, Daniels Belugins, in a small third-floor studio.

“Different look,” Ostapenko said as her mother, Jelena Jakovleva, and her financial adviser, Ingrida Latimira, watched from a corner of the room.

Jakovleva is a highly trained tennis coach with a master’s degree who played at an elite level when Latvia was part of the Soviet Union. But her initial dream for her only child was not for her to win Wimbledon or Roland Garros.

“I didn’t want Alona to be a professional tennis player, because I was a pro tennis player, and I know how hard it is,” Jakovleva said. “When she was 4 years old, we started ballroom dancing. That was my idea, and my dream. It was what I wanted to do, but in the Soviet Union it was not popular.”

And why was it her dream?

“Because it was very nice dresses and very nice movements, nice people, your partners as well,” she said. “It is like a different life than we had in the Soviet Union.”

Nonetheless, Jakovleva has had to settle for a tennis champion.

“That’s all right,” she said with a smile.

But she has had the chance to watch her daughter dance, and dance very well, for years. Ostapenko did not decide to prioritize tennis until age 12 and said she might have waited longer if the summer dance camp she was eager to attend had had a tennis court nearby.

“So I didn’t go, and they took away the good dance partner,” she said. “Every year it was the same issue with these summer camps. It’s tough to do two things at the highest level.”

But after a competitive break from dancing between 12 and 18, she continues to practice whenever she returns to Riga. She has two coaches: one for Latin dance and another, the 24-year-old Belugins, for more classical fare like the Viennese waltz.

She and Belugins met at the Riga Ball, a formal-dress event in Riga’s 14th century landmark building, the House of the Blackheads. The ball was started in 2016 in an attempt to revive interest in traditional European dances like the waltz.

“She is a talented girl in many things,” Belugins said. “When I watched the French Open with my friends, I told the guys that she’s my partner, and we dance together, and they thought I was kidding, and said, ‘No, I’ve got videos.’ So I showed them and they were like, ‘Wow!'”

Ostapenko’s first tennis competition was in Liepaja, a small coastal city of about 70,000, where her mother and Sevastova grew up. Liepaja is also Porzingis’ home city and is nearly as famous for being windy.

“When she was 6, Alona went to visit her grandma in Liepaja and she saw that there was a tournament, and she wanted to take part in it,” Jakovleva said. “She won one game and then suddenly she saw a cat and she ran away from the court to chase the cat. She lost interest in the tennis.”

But she would soon return, and under her mother’s tutelage, develop into one of the game’s most promising young talents. She won Les Petis As, the prestigious junior tournament in Tarbes, France, at age 13 in 2011 and played in the Australian Open junior event in 2012, racing around the players’ lounge asking for photographs with stars like Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Victoria Azarenka and Ostapenko’s personal favorite at the time, Juan Martín del Potro.

Those photos are now on display in her Riga club.

“It was like a field trip for school,” she said. “All the stars. It’s funny, because now I see them at almost every tournament that is a combined event.”

Ostapenko’s power was there from the start. “She was just born like that,” Jakovleva said. “My job was not to try to destroy what she had from nature. She’s very flexible and very loose.”

Ostapenko’s father, Jevgenijs, is Ukrainian and was a goalkeeper for FC Metalurh Zaporizhya in southeastern Ukraine.

“She’s got the genetics from Ukraine,” said Jakovleva, who is more slight of build than her daughter and played a more defensive, slice-based game. “Her grandfather was quite big and very strong, and her father is quite strong as well.”

Ostapenko’s serve, which has been her biggest liability as a professional, was once a strength, according to Jakovleva, but deteriorated after a shoulder injury caused her to alter the motion.

“Up to 15 years old, she was very good in serving,” Jakovleva said. “It’s something mental probably now. The pain is gone, but she cannot find the right motion.”

— ‘I Never Wanted to Leave Riga’

There have been other challenges along the path to the top five, including financial issues. Though she is proudly Latvian, Ostapenko said she had received offers to represent other nations. But Jakovleva said her family was ultimately able to pay the tennis bills through its own savings, funding from friends and other private benefactors, a few commercial sponsors and the International Tennis Federation’s development fund.

Winning Roland Garros, with its first prize of 2.1 million euros ($2.46 million), has certainly increased Ostapanko’s budget and her team. She has split from her longtime agent Ugo Colombini, who signed her at 13, to join the huge global agency WME-IMG and agent Max Eisenbud, who also represents Maria Sharapova. Ostapenko has hired veteran coach David Taylor for 15 weeks this season, just as she worked with Spanish player Anabel Medina Garrigues on a part-time basis when she won last year’s French Open.

But Jakovleva has remained a central figure, and for Ostapenko, having her mother as primary coach for most of her career has certainly helped the bottom line. She was able to remain based in Riga throughout her teens, unlike Gulbis and Sevastova, who both left Latvia to train at the Niki Pilic Tennis Academy near Munich.

“I never wanted to leave Riga. Never,” Ostapenko said. “I think I showed everybody you can practice at home and do everything to prepare well for winning good tournaments.”

Jakovleva said she often studied the coaching methods at foreign tennis academies when they were traveling for international competitions. Her conclusion: Her daughter could do just as well or better at home.

“Often there was one good coach in an academy and that coach was already busy with someone else and the other coaches were much lower level, and a lower level than those working in Latvia,” Jakovleva said. “It was a mix of things. I had this higher education, this master’s degree as a coach, and I can professionally evaluate how coaches are working. I felt qualified to do that.”

It also helped that Riga had some genuine indoor courts, unlike Liepaja, where Sevastova’s only option in the cold months was to play in school gymnasiums with wooden floors and makeshift nets. Those gym floors are still covered today with an intricate pattern of lines of different colors, each color corresponding to a different sport (basketball, volleyball, tennis etc.).

“We played outdoors from May until September, but the other parts of the year it was all in the schools on the wood,” said Sevastova, who left for Pilic’s academy at 15 and is based near Vienna.

Tennis, particularly for girls, is an increasingly popular sport in Latvia, and the success of Ostapenko and Sevastova is certainly a major factor. Work on a new tennis center in Liepaja, with five indoor courts, is set to begin in July.

Before the age of 12, Ostapenko also trained regularly on indoor courts in Riga with an uneven wooden floor, and Jakovleva still coaches a small group of promising juniors in that facility.

The drafty spartan gym is quite a contrast to the Enri tennis club, which has couches courtside and cappuccinos at the bar, and even more of a contrast to the center courts of the world where Ostapenko now earns her very good living.

“I really love those big courts,” Ostapenko said. “But if you turn time back to when I grew up on these wooden courts where the bounce of the ball was unpredictable and very fast and in the winter it was very cold, then I think all those things made me even stronger and a better player.”

She also thinks those quick, low-bouncing courts shaped her style. “Maybe that’s why I’m playing aggressive tennis,” she said.

For some, Ostapenko, fluent in Russian and Latvian, is a unifying figure in a country that regained independence from the Soviet Union only in 1991 and has a large ethnic Russian population.

She speaks Russian at home and attended a Russian-language secondary school, graduating near the top of her class, instead of following the common route of many tennis phenoms and opting for home schooling. She and her mother speak Latvian — “Like a secret language,” Jakovleva said — when they are talking tactics during tournaments and on changeovers during coaching visits on the WTA Tour.

“She’s a nice icebreaker, especially now with all the Russian things going on,” said Kristaps Birmanis, the owner of the Riga design concept store Bold. “Her native language is Russian, but she speaks Latvian like normal. I think she respects where she’s from, the Latvian language and culture.”

Back in her Porsche rolling through Riga, Ostapenko scrolled through the definitively multicultural music on her cellphone with her right hand while holding the steering wheel with her left. The songs were in Spanish, Russian, English and Latvian, and the longer the drive lasted, the more she was interested in singing along. And in hitting the accelerator.

“I hate driving slow,” she said with a chuckle. “No really, I hate it. So boring.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.