Belgium’s four-time singles Grand Slam champion, Kim Clijsters, has decided to bring the curtain down on her tennis career for the third time.
The 38-year-old announced her decision Tuesday on social media.
Kim Clijsters managed to climb to No. 1 in the world in both singles and doubles in 2003. She managed to win the U.S. Open three times (2005, 2009-10) and the 2011 Australian Open.
She also won grand slam doubles titles at Wimbledon and the French Open in 2003.
Having initially retired in 2007 to get married and start a family she returned two years later.
The Belgian retired again in 2012 before launching another comeback bid in 2020 which coincided almost identically with the spread of the global pandemic and never took flight.
Clijsters was enshrined in the tennis Hall of Fame in 2017 among the immortals of the game.
She finishes with a 523-131 match record (80.0 percent), 41 titles, the No.1 ranking four different times over a span of eight years, and $24 million-plus in prize money.
Helped by an arresting combination of power and flexibility, Clijsters became a Grand Slam champion on her 20th birthday, pairing with Ai Sugiyama to win the 2003 French Open doubles.
The pair repeated at Wimbledon, but Clijsters had to wait until the 2005 US Open for her first singles title.
In May 2007 she announced her retirement at the age of 23.
An invitation from the All England Club in 2009 moved Clijsters to focus on tennis again only a few months after she had given birth to her daughter Jada.
After more than two years from the game, Clijsters won the 2009 US Open against all odds beating Serena and Venus Williams, and Li Na on the way to the final, where she prevailed over Caroline Wozniacki.
She defended her title in 2010 and won the Australian Open in 2011 before stepping away from tennis once again in 2012.
But more than seven years later Clijsters decided to give tennis another go.
She played only five matches while COVID-19 was wreaking havoc with world travel before she suffered a knee injury.
With no wins to her name after her comeback, she decided to call it a day one final time.
There will be no shortage of tennis options after her retirement.
The experience of running the Kim Clijsters Academy in Bree, Belgium has shown her the rewards of sharing her knowledge of the game. She is certain to be a fixture at the Grand Slams, doing television work and playing legends tennis.
