Martina Hingis, who won five Grand Slam titles and is one of only six female players to hold the No. 1 ranking in both singles and doubles at the same time, announced her retirement from tennis via a Facebook post on Thursday.
It's the third time she has announced her retirement over her career and, at 37 years old, one would assume that this one will stick.
"Now that the cat is out of the bag, here we are for the third, and final time," she wrote. "Looking back now, it's hard to believe that almost exactly 23 years ago I made my professional debut. The years that followed have been some of the most rewarding years of my life, both personally and professionally, but I believe the time has come for me to retire, which I will be doing after my last match here in Singapore."
Hingis and Chan Yung-Jan of Taiwan are the top-seeded doubles team at the WTA Finals in Singapore. On Thursday, they defeated Anna-Lena Groenefeld and Kveta Peschke, 6-3, 6-2, in the quarterfinals. Hingis and Chan won their first Grand Slam doubles title together last month at the U.S. Open, one of 13 women's doubles Grand Slam championships Hingis has won (she also won seven mixed doubles championships). In 1998, Hingis won the calendar-year doubles grand slam with two partners, Mirjana Lucic at the Australian Open and Jana Novotna in the other three majors. She also is the youngest-ever Grand Slam winner in professional tennis history by virtue of her Wimbledon doubles crown with Helena Sukova in 1996, when she was just 15.
The next year, Hingis won her first singles Grand Slam at the Australian Open and defeated Novotna to become the youngest Wimbledon singles champion since Lottie Dod in 1887. Hingis either won or finished second in nine of the 12 Grand Slam events between 1997 and 1999, with her final victory coming in the 1999 Australian Open. After that stretch, however, Hingis would only appear in three more Grand Slam finals, all of them at the Australian Open, and in February 2003 she announced her first retirement, citing injuries and a desire to get her education.
