Barbora Krejcikova

Barbora Krejcikova reached the top of the doubles world long before the singles tour reckoned with her. The Brno native was shaped by the late Jana Novotna, the 1998 Wimbledon champion who took her on as a teenager and built a game around variety rather than pace. Paired with countrywoman Katerina Siniakova, she swept all four majors and Olympic gold to complete a Career Golden Slam in doubles, and rose to world No. 1 in the discipline — a résumé most players would retire on.

What makes her singles game an outlier in a baseline-bludgeoning era is craft: heavy slice, a willingness to come forward, drop shots and angles that look borrowed from a different decade. She's right-handed but plays like a tactician, dictating with placement and disguise instead of raw power. The trade-off is consistency — the serve can wobble and the margins are thin, which is why her best results tend to be peaks rather than plateaus.

The singles breakthrough came at the 2021 French Open, where she won the title from outside the seedings, and she added a second major at Wimbledon in 2024 — beating the likes of Jasmine Paolini and Elena Rybakina en route. She climbed to a career-high singles ranking of No. 2 and has banked wins over the very top of the game, from Iga Swiatek to Aryna Sabalenka, proving the major runs were no fluke.

Now ranked 45, Krejcikova is in rebuild mode after injury-disrupted stretches knocked her off the seeding lines. The talent that won two Slams hasn't gone anywhere; the task is stringing healthy weeks together. For a player who has already done everything in doubles and twice lifted a singles major, the back half of her career is about reminding the draw that the craft still travels.