SPOTLIGHTS: SERENA WİLLİAMS🎾

The youngest of five sisters, Williams was born in Saginaw, Michigan, where she took up tennis at the age of four under the guidance of her father Richard.

There, she attended the Rick Macci tennis academy and before her 11th birthday, she had already amassed a fearsome record of 46–3 playing on the junior United States Tennis Association.

At 14, she made her professional debut and within two years she had cracked the top 100 female tennis players on the planet, recording impressive scalps against world no.7 Mary Pierce and world no.4 Monica Seles in 1997.

In 1998 her trajectory really began to take off, beating world no.3 Lindsay Davenport in the quarter-finals of the Midibank International in Sydney, with her first major coming a year later at the US Open where she became just the second African-American woman to lift the trophy. Plenty more would follow

Serena Williams career highlights

Her wins over Pierce and Seles at the Ameritech Cup in 1997 made her the lowest ranked player (304th) ever to have beaten two top 10 players in the same competition.

Her victory at the 2017 Australian Open was her 23rd career grand slam, a surpassing Steffi Graf’s haul of 22 to make her the most prolific champion of the Open era.

She has won seven Australian Open titles, three French Open titles, seven Wimbledon titles and six US Open titles.

With her sister Venus, she has also cleaned up in doubles competition, winning four Australian Open titles, two French Open titles, six Wimbledon titles and two US Open titles.

Williams won an Olympic gold medal at London 2012 in singles competition; having won doubles gold with Venus in Sydney 2000, Beijing 2008 and in London.

In total, she has spent 309 weeks as the world no. 1 player.

On 19 April, she announced she is 20 weeks pregnant — meaning Williams was around eight weeks pregnant while winning her 2017 Australian Open title in Melbourne.