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Great Athletes of the Twenty-First Century

Garbiñe Muguruza

by Chris Cullen

Born: October 8, 1993

Caracas, Venezuela

Also known as: Garbiñe Muguruza Blanco (full name)

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TENNIS

The Venezuelan-born Spanish tennis player Garbiñe Muguruza has drawn comparisons to all-time greats Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova for her powerful serve, blistering returns, and fearless style of play. Standing at six feet tall, Muguruza has emerged as a force on the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) Tour since enjoying a breakout 2014 season, during which she captured her first singles title and defeated several top-ranked players, among them Williams, one of her childhood heroes.

In 2015, Muguruza reached her first Grand Slam final at the Wimbledon Championships, which she lost to Williams. She finished second to Williams that year in prize money and achieved a then-career-high singles ranking of number three. Building on that success, Muguruza solidified her status as the “next big thing” in tennis during the 2016 season, upsetting Williams in the French Open final to claim her first Grand Slam title. Her victory led many observers to tout her as the most likely heir to Williams, although the sentiment was not a new one; in advance of the 2015 Wimbledon final, Christopher Clarey wrote for the New York Times (9 July 2015), “Muguruza is that rare player with the tool kit to match up with Williams’s strengths.”

Early Life

Garbiñe Muguruza Blanco was born on October 8, 1993, in Caracas, Venezuela, to a Basque father, José Antonio Muguruza, and a Venezuelan mother, Scarlet Blanco. She began playing tennis at the age of three and has said that her first memory of the game is of playing tennis with her two older brothers, Asier and Igor. Muguruza is known for her on-court fearlessness, a trait she attributes to her parents. “I always had that,” she told Reem Abulleil for the United Arab Emirates–based sports newspaper Sport360. “I think my parents always told me, ‘You have to be brave and don’t be scared of anything.’”

When Muguruza was around six years old, she moved to Spain with her family. At age seven she began training at the Bruguera Tennis Academy, near Barcelona, which was founded by the legendary Spanish coach Lluís Bruguera and his son, Sergi, who won back-to-back French Open titles in 1993 and 1994. It was there where Muguruza’s tennis talent began to blossom. “You could see her talent from the beginning,” Sergi Bruguera said, as quoted by Clarey.

One of Muguruza’s favorite tennis players growing up was Swiss star Martina Hingis, a five-time Grand Slam singles champion who used a combination of skills and smarts to compensate for her relatively small stature. Inspired by Hingis and by Spanish players Conchita Martínez and Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, Muguruza initially adopted a style of play that relied more on stamina and baseline defensive tactics and trained almost exclusively on Spain’s ubiquitous red clay courts. However, as she grew older and taller, she transitioned to a power game modeled after players such as Serena Williams and Pete Sampras and switched her focus to hard courts, which better suit players with powerful serves and returns. She started playing in national tournaments at around the age of twelve but mostly skipped the junior circuit, save for competing at the French Open Junior Championships and a handful of European tournaments.

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By age fourteen Muguruza had already won two Spanish national championships. This was enough for Lluís Bruguera, who oversaw much of Muguruza’s early tennis career, to predict that she would one day become a top-five player. Bruguera began entering her in the qualifying draws of WTA and International Tennis Federation (ITF) tournaments. She played in her first WTA tournament in Barcelona in 2008, and over the next four years she collected seven singles titles on the ITF circuit.

The Road to Excellence

Muguruza turned professional in March 2012, at age eighteen. After winning her seventh ITF singles title earlier that month, she made her WTA main draw debut at the Miami Open, entering as a wild card ranked at number 208, and reached the fourth round. In the second round of that tournament, only her second WTA-level match, Muguruza defeated then-ninth-ranked Vera Zvonareva of Russia, matching the record for fastest defeat of a top-ten player (a distinction shared by American player Andrea Leand and French player Julie Coin). She subsequently reached her first WTA quarterfinal at a tournament in Fes, Morocco, and finished the 2012 season ranked at 104.

Muguruza continued to progress in 2013, notching fourth-round finishes at both the Indian Wells Masters and the Miami Open. She also reached the second round in three of the four WTA Grand Slam tournaments: the Australian Open, the French Open, and Wimbledon. Following Wimbledon, however, Muguruza was forced to undergo surgery on her right ankle, which sidelined her for the entire second half of the season. Over the ensuing six months, Muguruza practiced tennis drills while sitting in a chair to expedite her return to the court. It was during that “very significant time” that she realized that she “really wanted to play tennis,” as she recalled to Abulleil. Her drive and tenacity paved the way for what would become a breakout 2014 season.

Muguruza started the season in auspicious fashion, earning her first WTA singles title at the Hobart International in Australia, where she won eight matches as a qualifier without dropping a set and defeated Czech player Klára Koukalová in the final. One week later, Muguruza reached the fourth round of the Australian Open. She then advanced to her second WTA final at the 2014 Brasil Tennis Cup in Florianópolis, Brazil, before losing to Koukalová in three sets.

Muguruza’s most notable performance of 2014 came during the second round of the French Open, when she defeated defending champion Serena Williams in straight sets. In total, Muguruza dropped only four games to Williams, who suffered her worst loss to date in a Grand Slam tournament. She went on to reach the quarterfinals, where she lost to eventual champion Maria Sharapova in three sets. Muguruza finished the season at number twenty-one in the WTA singles rankings, marking the first time her year-end ranking cracked the top twenty-five.

The Emerging Champion

Prior to the 2015 season, tennis legend Martina Navratilova, an eighteen-time Grand Slam winner, pegged Muguruza as one of only two legitimate rivals for Williams. Despite again being slowed by an ankle injury at the start of the season, Muguruza advanced to the fourth round of the Australian Open for the second consecutive year. She lost to Williams in the fourth round, 2–6, 6–3, 6–2, in a match that was described by Christopher Clarey as “big-bang, first-strike tennis.”

Muguruza next showcased her punishing power game at the 2015 French Open, where she reached the quarterfinals for the second straight year, losing to eventual runner-up Lucie Šafářová. She struggled, however, to start the grass-court season, suffering a pair of early-round defeats at tournaments in Birmingham and Eastbourne, England. Muguruza nonetheless bounced back at Wimbledon, successively defeating top-seeded veteran players Angelique Kerber, Caroline Wozniacki, Timea Bacsinszky, and Agnieszka Radwańska to advance to her first Grand Slam final.

In the run-up to the championship match, in which Muguruza would again square off against Williams, Williams’s coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, described Muguruza as “a super-dangerous opponent,” according to Clarey, citing her first-rate serve, her “aggressive returns,” her “flat strokes,” and “the way she takes the ball early” as causes for concern. Despite losing to Williams in straight sets, Muguruza moved up to number nine in the world singles rankings following the tournament.

However, Muguruza failed to build on her success during the US Open Series, losing to qualifiers in the opening rounds of tournaments in Toronto, Canada, and Cincinnati, Ohio, and then losing in the second round of the US Open. Following that defeat, Muguruza parted ways with her Spanish coach, Alejo Mancisidor, with whom she had been working since 2010. In September 2015 she began working with French coach Sam Sumyk, who had previously guided the Belarusian player Victória Azárenka to number one in the world.

Muguruza’s partnership with Sumyk paid immediate dividends, as she reached the final of the 2015 Wuhan Open in China the following month. She then followed up that performance by winning her second career WTA singles title at the 2015 China Open in Beijing. She subsequently reached the semifinals of the year-end WTA Finals, helping her secure a career-high year-end singles ranking of number three. She finished the year with $4.5 million in prize money, second only to Williams’s earnings on the WTA tour.

First Grand Slam Title

Muguruza entered the 2016 season with the expectation that she would compete again for a Grand Slam title. However, she was dogged by plantar fasciitis and inconsistent play during the first half of the season, which resulted in a number of early-round losses. Still, Muguruza remained undaunted. During the run-up to the 2016 French Open, she told Paul Newman for the Independent (19 Apr. 2016), “I always think that I can win a tournament. I’ve never felt a situation where I don’t see myself as a possible champion. Some people question that, but you have to believe that you can do it.”

That confident mindset served Muguruza well at the French Open, where she dropped only one set en route to advancing to her second Grand Slam final in as many years. In the championship match, she again faced Williams, whom she convincingly defeated in straight sets, 7–5, 6–4, to win her first Grand Slam title. Demonstrating unflappable poise and composure, Muguruza “held her ground just inside the baseline, head down, firing bullets back at the most ferocious ball-striker in WTA history,” Peter Bodo wrote for ESPN.com (4 June 2016). “She showed that she can stand in there and go blow for blow with anyone.”

With her victory, Muguruza, then twenty-two, became the youngest singles champion since Azárenka won the Australian Open in 2012, as well as the first Spanish woman to win a Grand Slam title since Arantxa Sánchez Vicario in 1998. Muguruza’s win prevented Williams from equaling Steffi Graf’s modern-era record of twenty-two Grand Slam singles titles. It marked Williams’s third consecutive loss in a Grand Slam final, lending credence to those touting Muguruza as the future of women’s tennis.

Continuing the Story

Following the French Open, Muguruza ascended to number two in the WTA rankings. She failed to build on her convincing Grand Slam win, however, and struggled with inconsistency for the remainder of the 2016 season, which saw her suffer a second-round exit at Wimbledon and third-round defeat at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As Nick McCarvel wrote of Muguruza for USA Today (30 Aug. 2016), “Her game, one of bludgeoning power off of both wings that cascades from her strong six-foot frame, is one that can turn ugly when it goes awry.”

Muguruza and her coach nonetheless remain optimistic about her future. “If she’s not as consistent as other people want, well, it doesn’t matter what they want,” Sumyk told McCarvel. “We are trying to evolve and move forward; that’s all that matters.” Muguruza, meanwhile, said to the same writer, “You go out and you try to win. That’s all I do. It’s always the same.”

In addition to singles tournaments, Muguruza has regularly played in women’s doubles competitions. She has won five WTA doubles titles—one in 2013 with partner María Teresa Torró Flor; two in 2014, one with Romina Oprandi and one with Carla Suárez Navarro; and two in 2015, both with Suárez Navarro—and she and Suárez Navarro finished as runners-up at the 2015 WTA Finals in Singapore. Muguruza has also represented Spain in the Fed Cup, the ITF’s annual international team competition in women’s tennis.

Summary

One of Spain’s most marketable athletes, Muguruza, who is known for her charismatic personality and striking looks, holds endorsement deals with Adidas, Babolat, and Rolex, among others. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, dancing, and listening to music.

Additional Sources

1 

Abulleil, Reem. “Interview: Garbine Muguruza—Sizzling Spaniard on Fast Track to Stardom.” Sport360, 16 Feb. 2015, sport360.com/article/international/32812/interview-garbine-muguruza-sizzling-spaniard-fast-track-stardom. Accessed 21 Nov. 2016.

2 

Bodo, Peter. “Why Garbine Muguruza Is Here for the Long Haul.” ESPN, 4 June 2016, www.espn.com/tennis/french16/story/_/id/15949933/french-open-why-garbine-muguruza-here-long-haul. Accessed 21 Nov. 2016.

3 

Clarey, Christopher. “Wimbledon 2015: Garbiñe Muguruza Realizes a Dream, but Faces Nightmarish Odds.” The New York Times, 9 July 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/sports/tennis/garbine-muguruza-realizes-a-dream-but-faces-nightmarish-odds.html. Accessed 21 Nov. 2016.

4 

McCarvel, Nick. “Garbine Muguruza Isn’t Worried about Others’ Expectations.” USA Today. USA Today, 30 Aug. 2016, www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/open/2016/08/29/garbine-muguruza-us-open/89561628/. Accessed 21 Nov. 2016.

5 

Newman, Paul. “French Open 2016: Garbine Muguruza Warns Rivals They’ll Be Stepping into ‘My Territory’ at Roland Garros.” The Independent, 19 Apr. 2016, www.independent.co.uk/sport/tennis/french-open-2016-garbine-muguruza-warns-rivals-theyll-be-stepping-into-my-territory-at-roland-garros-a6991461.html. Accessed 21 Nov. 2016.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Cullen, Chris. "Garbiñe Muguruza." Great Athletes of the Twenty-First Century,Salem Press, 2018. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Ath21C_0308.
APA 7th
Cullen, C. (2018). Garbiñe Muguruza. Great Athletes of the Twenty-First Century. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Cullen, Chris. "Garbiñe Muguruza." Great Athletes of the Twenty-First Century. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2018. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.