Esther Vergeer is arguably the greatest athlete of all time.

On a winning run of 344 matches, the wheelchair tennis player from the Netherlands rules her sport like a despot.

Gold in the Beijing Paralympics will take her tally beyond 350 consecutive wins since 2003.

There is no statistic quite like it in sport.

Ten years ago, Vergeer was a teenage wheelchair basketball player on the fringes of the Dutch squad. She had entered a few tennis events and found the individuality of the sport appealing. She switched to tennis full-time in 1998 and - boom. Vergeer, rather to her surprise, discovered she was the best player in the world.

"It was instant success," says Vergeer, now 27, "and a little scary." Within months of giving up basketball for tennis, she won the US Open. Within a year, she was world No 1, and within two, a Paralympic gold medalist. Almost by accident, she found herself at the pinnacle of her sport, and just about unbeatable.

"I think about the streak every day, every match - This is going to be the one that I lose," Vergeer says.

In August, she won the Mercedes Open in Holland (her 132nd singles title), a final tune-up tournament before Beijing where she is expected to add two more gold to those won in singles and doubles at the Sydney and Athens Games. "A few months ago I wanted the loss to happen, well before the Paralympics, to get the pressure off," she says.

Vergeer, born on July 18, 1981 in Woerden in central Holland, has been in a wheelchair since the age of eight, when surgery to correct defective blood vessels around her spinal cord left her unable to walk. She took up wheelchair sport as part of her rehabilitation, something strongly encouraged in Holland: Anyone who loses the use of their legs receives a free sports chair from the government, as well as the option of a year's training in any chosen sport. After three years, anyone still in training gets a new chair. This helps explain why so many of the best wheelchair tennis players are Dutch.

It does not explain, however, why Vergeer is an invincible among them. Traveling to a tournament in America, her wheelchair broke in the plane's hold ("every wheelchair athlete has trouble with airlines") and Vergeer had to borrow a friend's to play. Unfamiliar, configured for somebody else, it was, says Vergeer, like playing in high heels.

She won the tournament anyway.

Success, she thinks, may be to the strength of her serve. She attributes this to the particularities of her disability: She has some feeling in her left leg (none in her right) but hits the ball with her right hand, forming what she calls 'a kind of diagonal' of strength and balance across her body.

The Guardian