Credit: Pavel Lebeda / Česká sportovní
In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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Petra Kvitová [CZE]Born: 8 March 1990
Career: 2007-present
Plays: Left-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (2011)
Peak Elo rating: 2,175 (1st place, January 2012)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 28
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Petra Kvitová’s serve is so big, it renders rankings irrelevant. She has played 119 matches in her career against opponents in the top ten, and she’s won 57 of them–just short of half. The winning percentage shouldn’t come as a surprise, as she has spent long stretches of time both in and out of the top ten herself. The odd thing is that her ranking–and its suggestion of her form at each stage of her career–has no relationship to her results.
Here are her records against the top ten, split up by her own ranking at the time of each match:
Petra Rank Record Win % as top 5 15-17 47% ranked 6-10 18-27 40% ranked 11-20 12-6 67% ranked 21-50 8-6 57% ranked 51+ 4-6 40%
The last row of that table is the eye-grabber, as it represents most of Kvitová’s career from her debut on tour to her breakthrough Wimbledon semi-final run in 2010. Petra’s first encounter with a top-tenner came in only her 14th tour-level match, at Memphis in 2008. 17 years old and ranked 143rd in the world, she qualified for the main draw and met top seed Venus Williams in the first round. Kvitová won in three. After the match, Venus delivered an understated warning to the rest of the tour: “She had a good serve and she was left-handed.”
Williams might have added: And she was inconsistent. The six-footer from the Czech Republic lost her next match to another player with a triple-digit ranking, Alla Kudryatseva, and two events later, she lost to 164th-ranked Elena Baltacha in an ITF $75K draw. Kvitová boosted her ranking exactly 100 places in 2008, from 150th to 50th, but she lost nine matches to players outside the top 100. The form that earned the shock victory over Venus and pushed WTA #1 Ana Ivanović to three sets in Montreal was often absent.
Petra had to wait a year and a half for her next top-ten victory. The delay was a price worth paying. At the 2009 US Open, still ranked outside the top 70, she advanced to the third round and earned a meeting with top seed and world #1 Dinara Safina. After two and half hours, Kvitová came through in a third-set tiebreak despite losing one more point than she won. Two days later, she lost to 50th-ranked Yanina Wickmayer.
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Everyone on tour quickly became aware of the damage that Kvitová and her serve could wreak. The rest of the world took note when she recorded her fourth top-ten victory at Wimbledon in 2010.
Petra’s first three wins at the Championships came against higher-ranked players, including seeds Zheng Jie and Victoria Azarenka. British papers were already calling her a giant-killer before her fourth-rounder with third seed Caroline Wozniacki. Wozniacki was four months younger than Kvitová, but she had won their previous two encounters, and the Danish star was only a few months away from reaching the number one ranking for the first time.
None of that mattered. Kvitová obliterated her. The score of 6-2, 6-0 might even understate how lopsided it was. Petra lost only six points on serve, and the match was over in 46 minutes. Reuters reported that the Czech’s “violent display of hitting” left Wozniacki “aghast.” Remarkably, Petra sustained enough form to get through her next match as well, fighting off three match points to advance past Kaia Kanepi in the quarter-finals. It took a quality performance from top seed Serena Williams to finally stop her.
The inevitable swoon didn’t take long to arrive. She lost five in a row after Wimbledon, four of them to lower-ranked opponents. She won only five more tour-level matches for the remainder of the year, and finished her season with a loss to 52nd-ranked Sofia Arvidsson at an ITF event in Poitiers. No one could take away the “Wimbledon semi-finalist” tag from her bio, but her ranking still wasn’t good enough to merit a place in the main draw of the Australian Open warm-up event in Sydney.
The 20-year-old Czech had gotten this far with a powerful lefty serve and tactics as aggressive as anyone’s on tour. When big hitters are so inconsistent, the usual prescription is to ease up a bit and play higher-percentage tennis. Petra probably heard that advice, but she didn’t listen. She went big in the opposite direction.
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Women’s tennis stats are a bit spotty for the first few years of Kvitová’s career, but we have enough data to get a general idea of how her game–and her serve in particular–has evolved.
In 2010, Petra won 57% of her service points and hit aces on 4.1% of them, two uninspiring numbers that make you wonder what the fuss was all about. She posted an ace rate of 10% or better in only three matches, and one of those was the Wozniacki beatdown, where the total of 5 aces in 33 points is almost too small to count. Kvitová’s serve looked good, and the angles she generated with her left-handed delivery took some getting used to, but the results–at least apart from her best days–didn’t match the reputation.
Everything changed in 2011. She won 61.5% of total serve points, and her ace rate jumped to 5.5%. As usual with tennis stats, the differences sound small, but both improvements were enormous. Her 2010 serve win rate of 57% was (and still would be) below average on tour, and 61.5% moved her into the elite. Petra continues to serve at the same level a decade later: Her 61.2% win rate in the last 52 weeks is good for sixth on tour and a tie with Iga Świątek.
Petra serves to Johanna Konta at Wimbledon in 2019
The ace rate jump, from 4.1% to 5.5%, isn’t quite as dramatic. But the improvement was particularly striking on the fast surfaces where Petra excels, and the difference showed up clearly in her results. In 2011, she recorded a double-digit ace rate in at least 11 different matches (up from 3 the previous year), including the Paris Indoors final against Kim Clijsters and four consecutive matches at Wimbledon. Kvitová’s ace rate at the grass-court major improved from 5.8% in 2010 to 8.9% in 2011–even though Maria Sharapova limited her to a single ace in the 2011 final.
Petra’s grass-court ace rate is important partly because so many her career highlights–starting with her 2011 and 2014 Wimbledon titles–have come on that surface. But even more, they hint that she was serving bigger on other surfaces, too, just that on slower courts, she benefited from more return errors and second-shot putaways. Except for relatively small sample of matches that have been charted, we don’t have stats like “percent of serves unreturned” or “percent of points won in two strokes or less.” The available evidence, such as it is, suggests that Kvitová’s serve–always tricky–developed into a truly fearsome weapon in 2011.
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Petra is best known for her ad-court slice serve out wide. Like the delivery that has saved Rafael Nadal a gazillion break points, it takes advantage of the server’s left-handedness and pulls right-handed returners way off the court to their backhand side.
But here’s something you might not have known. She hits way more aces, and wins more points on her first serve, when she targets a righty’s forehand. Based on over 150 matches logged by Match Charting Project volunteers, here’s how her results break out in the ad court:
Direction Freq Won% Ace% T 32% 71% 18% Body 9% 56% 0% Wide 59% 69% 8%
She hits the wide serve much more often, but look at that difference in aces! I can understand why she’d opt to go wide most of the time: There’s more room for error, and even an average (for her) first serve in that direction is unlikely to get a strong reply. But because she has her opponents leaning in that direction, her down-the-middle serves are more than twice as likely to go untouched.
The trends are the same in the deuce court:
Direction Freq Won% Ace% T 50% 64% 8% Body 12% 57% 0% Wide 38% 71% 13%
More serves go to the righty backhand, but when she goes to the forehand, she hits more aces and wins more points overall. And in this direction, the difference in frequency isn’t as stark. It’s as if all those wide serves in the ad court get the returner thinking backhand, and that’s enough to give Petra extra room on the forehand side.
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Let’s go back to something you probably do know about Kvitová. She’s one of the most aggressive players in the modern game. Setting aside the difficulty of defining “aggressive” in a way that accommodates both baseliners and the elite serve-and-volleyers of the past, she may be the most aggressive great player of any era.
The average rally length in those 150-plus charted matches is 3.3 strokes. Of all the players with at least 20 charted matches, only three other women have recorded such short points: Julia Görges, also at 3.3, and CoCo Vandeweghe and Aryna Sabalenka at 3.2. To give an idea of how extreme one’s tactics must be to play such short points, the crowd at 3.4 includes Jelena Ostapenko and Dayana Yastremska.
Rally lengths alone might be enough to prove the accuracy of Petra’s reputation. But Match Charting Project contributor Lowell West went one step further, devising a metric he called Aggression Score to quantify how often players ended points. “Aggression” on the tennis court isn’t necessarily good or bad–it could mean a player is ending points quickly with unreturnable shots, or that she’s hitting tons of unforced errors.
When Lowell wrote up his research, the current wave of young ball-bashers like Sabalenka and Yastremska had yet to arrive. In 2015, Petra truly stood alone. Lowell’s graph shows just how unique she was:
It didn’t matter if she was serving or returning: She ended points more quickly than any of the other big names on tour. In fairness, Görges might have joined her in the extreme top right corner of the graph; we just didn’t have very much data on her at that point. (We’ve added several thousand matches since then, including a few dozen of Julia’s.)
Kvitová aimed for the lines and ended points quickly from the day she debuted on tour. But this is another category where it appears that she adopted more extreme tactics after her first few seasons. In the three matches we’ve charted from her 2010 Wimbledon run, her average rally length was 3.3. In the final three matches of her path to the 2014 Wimbledon title, she lopped about 10% off that number and played just under 3.0 strokes per point.
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The top-line summary of Petra’s career suggests a lot of ups and downs, and she has certainly had her share. She narrowly escaped career-ending injury in a December 2016 home invasion, then she somehow made it back on tour in time for the 2017 French Open. Her other health scares hardly compare to that one, but she has battled a range of other maladies, from ankle problems to mononucleosis.
Yet her results have been remarkably steady. She went five years between her second and third major finals (at 2014 Wimbledon and the 2019 Australian), but she won at least one tournament every season from 2011 to 2019, and won multiple titles in all but one of those years, not to mention an Olympic bronze medal in 2016. In the same span, she won 30 Fed Cup rubbers, helping lead the Czech side to a whopping six championships.
With her singles medal in Rio
Even as her results suffer–she’s 9-8 in 2022 through the Miami third round and has reached only two finals in the 2020s–she remains a thorn in the side of the best players in the world. Early in 2020, she fell out of the top ten. But in her sixth match with a double-digit ranking that year, she upset yet another WTA #1, Ashleigh Barty. Last month, she struck again, ousting top seed and then-#2 Aryna Sabalenka in the Dubai second round. The average rally length in that match was, unsurprisingly, well under three shots.
Kvitová rarely gets much credit as an influential figure in modern tennis history. She never reached the top spot on the ranking table, and as imposing as her serve is, there aren’t that many six-foot lefties to follow in her footsteps. Yet a bullet-point list of the Czech’s attributes–big serves, aggressive returns, go-for-broke tactics, erratic results–fits an increasing number of leading women every year. Her “violent display” at Wimbledon twelve years ago would hardly merit a mention today. The current crop of young stars grew up watching Petra win Wimbledon, and clearly, they were taking notes.