Manon Bollegraf

While she did once place 29th on the WTA ranking and reached the 1992 Roland Garros quarter-finals, Manon Bollegraf was better known as a doubles player. Between 1985 and 2000, playing with a large variety of partners, she won a total of 26 WTA tournaments in the women’s doubles, as well as 4 lower tier ITF events. In 1997, she reached the final of Wimbledon alongside Nicole Arendt, but lost to Gigi Fernandez and Natalya Zvereva. In the mixed doubles, Bollegraf won four Grand Slams. With Tom Nijssen, she won Roland Garros in 1989, and the 1991 US Open, while with Rick Leach she won both the Australian Open and US Open in 1997. With both players she also lost a Grand Slam final. At the 1996 Olympics, Bollegraf and Brenda Schultz-McCarthy were seeded 3rd but lost out in the bronze medal match against Spain’s Conchita Martínez and Arantxa Sánchez Vicario. In 1998, Bollegraf was a member of the Fed Cup team that played the final against France, losing both her doubles rubber and the match.

Suffering from a knee injury, she retired in 1999, but attempted a comeback to qualify for the Sydney 2000 Olympics in the women’s doubles, but she and Caroline Vis lost the Dutch seat to Miriam Oremans and Kristie Boogert, the eventual silver medalists. She then retired definitively, remaining active as a national youth coach. In 2004 she returned to international tennis as the Dutch Fed Cup captain until 2013. Since then, Bollegraf works as a self-employed performance trainer and coach.