Sania Mirza is a professional tennis player from India. She is a former world No. 1 in doubles and has won a Grand Slam doubles title six times in her career. The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) listed her as India’s No. 1 player from 2003 till she retired from singles in 2013.

Mirza was tantalizingly close to winning a medal at the Rio Olympics five years ago, when she and Rohan Bopanna lost the semi-final and the bronze playoff match, which remains one of the few regrets of her long and illustrous career. 

But here she is, at 34, preparing for her fourth Olympic appearance, juggling her career as a tennis player with her role as a mother to her two-year-old son Izhaan.

By entering the Tokyo Games with her protected doubles ranking of world No. 9 partnering Ankita Raina, she is giving her aspirations of an elusive Olympic gold one final shot.

Mirza defeated Svetlana Kuznetsova, Vera Zvonareva, and Marion Bartoli, as well as former world No. 1s Martina Hingis, Dinara Safina, and Victoria Azarenka, throughout her singles career. She is India’s highest-ranked female player, having reached world No. 27 in mid-2007. However, a serious wrist injury prompted her to retire from singles and concentrate on doubles.

She has set a number of records for women’s tennis in India, including earning more than $1 million in career prize money (she has earned over $6.9 million in total), winning a singles WTA title, and winning six Grand Slam titles (three each in women’s doubles and mixed doubles), as well as qualifying for (and eventually winning) the WTA Finals in 2014 with Cara Black, defending the title.

Mirza is one of just two Indian women’s tennis players to have won a WTA championship of any sort, and she is the only one to have reached the top 100 singles rankings. She is the third Indian woman to play and win a round in a Grand Slam tournament in the Open Era (after Nirupama Mankad and Nirupama Sanjeev; second in singles after Sanjeev), and the first to progress past the second round.

In October 2005, Time named Mirza one of the “50 Heroes of Asia.” Mirza was included to The Economic Times’ list of “33 women who made India proud” in March 2010. On November 25, 2013, she was named the UN Women’s Goodwill Ambassador for South Asia during a ceremony commemorating the International Day to End Violence Against Women. She was included to Time magazine’s 2016 list of the world’s 100 most influential people.