Elise Mertens, the new world number 1 in doubles

Elise Mertens has already built up a solid record on the women's doubles circuit, playing with a variety of partners over the course of the tennis season. She won the last Grand Slam tournament in Melbourne (Australia) with Aryna Sabalenka (Belarus) and continued to perform well with Veronika Kudermetova (Russia) and, more recently, with Su-Wei Hsieh (Taiwan), her partner for the next Roland-Garros tournament. She has therefore accumulated a lot of points of her own in recent months.

The great surprise was revealed when the women's tennis bodies recently published the new rankings. Although in singles, the player from Limburg only climbed two places to reach 14^th in the world, it was in the doubles category that she made history. She became nothing less than the world's leading player in the discipline!

"I'm happy, it's a dream come true.  I've always enjoyed playing doubles. Being world number two or world number one is obviously not the same thing.  I don't know how long I'll stay at number one, but at least I will have been there," she said modestly in response to the announcement.

Elise Mertens therefore becomes the third Belgian tennis player to reach a world number one ranking after Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin in singles.