A decade of dominance

We watch sports because we love rooting for our favorite teams and athletes to win. As Vince Lombardi once famously quipped, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”

Yet despite the fact that extended winning streaks are a relatively rare occurrence, we often fail to notice their brilliance until they end. As I watched the Portland Winterhawks’
14-game winning streak come to an end against Seattle on Saturday, my thoughts drifted toward the current most dominant athlete in sports.

On Jan. 30, 2003, Esther Vergeer was defeated in a tennis match by Daniela Di Toro in Sydney, Australia. Over the nine years since that loss, the Dutch star has played in 470 singles matches and has come out with a victory every time. She is already fast approaching the Grand Slam records of Martina Navratilova and Margaret Court, though she remains in the shadows of most sports fans’ minds. With 42 major singles and doubles titles in her career, she has already reached third on the all-time list—despite lacking the opportunity to play mixed doubles. Grand Slam tournaments do not have mixed doubles events for wheelchair athletes.

As an 8-year-old girl in the Netherlands, Vergeer was forced to undergo emergency surgery to repair hemorrhaging blood vessels around her spinal cord. The operation left her paralyzed from the waist down, but rather than succumbing to the dejection of losing her legs at such a young age, Vergeer embraced wheelchair volleyball, basketball and tennis, showing a remarkable aptitude for all three. As a teenager she began playing in club basketball games and tennis tournaments. Vergeer was called up to the Dutch national basketball team in 1996 and was part of the 1997 European championship roster. Following her basketball success, she switched full-time to tennis.

With preternatural movement and anticipation on the court, Vergeer won the 1998 U.S. Open wheelchair exhibition and the singles and doubles tournaments at the 2000 Paralympics. She continued to build on that success, regrouping after the loss to Di Toro to win the 2003 Australian and U.S. Open and then became unbeatable. During one stretch of her streak, from August 2004 to October 2006, she won every set of every match she played (a run of 250 consecutive sets), and was pushed to a tiebreaker only once.

Court won 62 Grand Slam championships over the course of her career; 19 of those were mixed-doubles trophies. Navratilova claimed 59 titles, 10 of which came in partnership with a male player. At 31, Vergeer is still young enough to challenge the records of Court and Navratilova even without mixed doubles in the equation. And if she continues to win over the next two years, she has a chance to surpass the all-time consecutive wins record set by
Pakistani squash savant Jahangir Khan, who won 555 matches from 1981 to 1986.

But winning isn’t the only thing. Eventually, Vergeer will lose, and we will be left to ponder her greatness in retrospect. After all, that final number—Khan’s 555, the 90 games won by the University of Connecticut women’s basketball from 2008 to 2010, the 187 consecutive matches won by 1964 Olympic gold-medal wrestler Osamu Watanabe—doesn’t exist until the victories stop coming. Sports fans should take the time to revel in every transcendent moment while it lasts.