THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London — Like so much in women’s tennis, it all goes back to Martina Navratilova.
She was the first great female champion of the modern era from what is now called the Czech Republic. She won on the Wimbledon grass like no one has, before or since. Nine singles titles, plus seven more in women’s doubles and four in mixed doubles.
Navratilova defected from Czechoslovakia to the U.S. in 1975, but as she became the best player the sport had ever seen, the little girls in her birth country kept watching.
Navratilova spawned Hana Mandlíková, who led to Helena Suková and Jana Novotná and Petra Kvitová and Karolína Plíšková and Barbora Krejčíková and Markéta Vondroušová and Kateřina Siniaková, the world’s top doubles player these days, who is also now on the cusp of the top 30 in singles. Suková was No. 1 in doubles and No. 4 in singles.
All of them won Grand Slam titles or became the world No. 1. All except Plíšková, Suková and Siniaková won the Wimbledon singles title. Plíšková made the singles final in 2021; Siniaková has three Wimbledon women’s doubles titles, two with Krejčíková; Suková won the women’s doubles four times and the mixed three times.
Now come Linda Nosková and Karolína Muchová, who may face each other in an all-Czech 2026 Wimbledon final. Yes, a country of just 11 million people has produced half of the women’s semifinalists for this year — and nearly 20 percent of the top 50 players in the world.
There were four in the final 16 of this tournament. There might have been more, had they not kept beating one another. Krejčíková beat Nikola Bartůňková in the third round. Then Muchová beat Krejčíková in the fourth round.
“There’s always just been someone,” Nosková, 21, said in a news conference after her 6-3, 7-5 quarterfinal win over No. 25 seed Elise Mertens, which was more one-sided than the scoreline suggests.
“For me, it has always been the fact that as such a small country, we can definitely do big things in the world if we look up to the people that did it.”
Krejčíková, 30, who won the title two years ago, said in a news conference earlier this week that building on the legacy of the Czech women’s game was a huge motivator for her as she embarked on her own tennis career.
“100 percent,” she said.
The funny thing about Nosková and Muchová, though, is that a large part of their success might come from using that legacy as a lightly held touchstone, rather than a sacred text. They both said they grew up largely unaware of what came before them.
Muchová, who will try to employ her all-court game that many top ex-pros have compared to Roger Federer’s to get the better of Coco Gauff in the first semifinal, said she was barely a tennis fan growing up.
“I think I figured out what a Grand Slam is when I was a teenager,” Muchová said.
Her parents didn’t raise her to be a tennis player. It was just one of a number of sports she did. Her father and brother were both professional soccer players. She played a little bit of everything. It wasn’t until she got older and began to have success as she got older that she had any hard knowledge of Czech women’s tennis history.
She had to do some research. None of her coaches or relatives had regaled her with tales of the footsteps she was beginning to follow.
“I looked back on all the great results from our Czech legends,” said Muchová, who is 29. “It’s honestly crazy how many Czech girls were able to win here.”
Nosková said she had a similar experience. She didn’t watch much tennis growing up. Like Muchová, she was busy.
“I had, like, maybe six, seven, eight hobbies that I was focusing on,” she said in a news conference. “It was never mainly tennis. I had all the gymnastics, all the horse riding, just all the sports in the world because my parents were very into any sort of movement.”
It doesn’t take an expert in parenting or athletic development to hear a lesson in all that. This is the era of youth sports specialization, of children being told to pick a sport (or to have one chosen for them) when they are barely starting school. Then they switch to home-schooling and build their lives around trying to become a future champion, even if the numbers are stacked against them.
Navratilova, who has had her own détente with her native country, said in an interview last year that girls who pursue tennis in the Czech Republic experience a different kind of coaching than the children she sees growing up in Florida, one of the world capitals of tennis development.
In the U.S., Navratilova, said, young players spend countless hours doing drills, learning how to bash a clean ball that’s fed to them by a coach standing next to shopping cart on the other side of the net. In the Czech Republic, she said, children are mostly playing points and games and sets from a young age.
From the beginning, they learn to construct points instead of simply hit balls. They learn to compete, through the ebbs and flows of sets and matches. They learn how to dissect an opponent with their own tools and skills. And they do it largely on clay, which only accelerates and exaggerates that development.
After beating Bartůňková, 20, who has the deceptive power to go with finesse that can make a player so dangerous, Krejčíková described what it’s like to develop in the world that Navratilova described.
“We have plenty of tournaments,” Krejčíková said. “We have team competitions, as well. We play singles and doubles every weekend, every tournament. I mean, we can play in between each other, like against each other practicing. In the clubs, there are plenty of kids coming up. Group practices.”
It’s not hard to see the common thread of the results. All the Czech players display an array of shots. They can play with power and touch. They love to work their way into the front of the court and finish at the net.
On Wednesday, Nosková pushed forward behind backhand blasts in the first set against Mertens, then won with a backhand drop volley off a cracking passing shot from her Belgian opponent. Two points later, she laced a slice backhand that died on the grass like a dart near the sideline.
She floated chip returns that pinned Mertens to the baseline, then feathered drop shots just over the net. But she also scorched aces and unreturned serves all afternoon, and cracked groundstrokes that Mertens could only watch.
It’s the sort of creative arsenal that Czech coaches encourage, Muchová said.
“They wouldn’t tell me like, ‘No, this isn’t going to work’,” Muchova said of her youth coaches. “We were working on my slice and all that, even though when I was a kid, it wasn’t working that much.”
And the expert knowledge is never far away. Krejčíková wrote Novotná a letter when she was 18, and Novotná ended up becoming her coach. Nosková said that Kvitová, who retired in 2025, was probably the one Czech player she knew about when she was young, since she had won Wimbledon in 2011 and 2014, landing her on the covers of magazines and billboards and on television in the Czech Republic.
Then, when Nosková was 18, Kvitová was on the other side of the net, for two matches. She was able to get to know her. That same year, she set foot on a grass tennis court for the first time, in Nottingham, England.
Fortunately, Barbora Strýcová, a former world No. 1 in doubles, and a two-time Wimbledon doubles champion, was there to hit with.
“I was so lost,” Noskova said. “She had all these great results on grass. It was tough to kind of match her rhythm. She’s also someone that I looked up to. It was fun to play with such an experienced player.”
On Thursday, Nosková will become the youngest first-time major semifinalist at Wimbledon since 2010. And since Kvitová, of course.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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