Don't beat yourself up for the motherland, the glory is yours

Everything Li Na does on the tennis court is to celebrate and honour her country and its way of life, naturally. As the most prolific singles player in the history of China, Li is expected to give thanks to the mainland sports system that made her great. But Li is also expected to show enough mental fortitude to beat the likes of Martina Hingis, Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova in a grand slam tournament.

The 24-year-old from Wuhan became the first Chinese player to be ranked in the top 30 in the world, the first to be ranked in the top 20 and she now sits at the high-water mark of number 16. At Wimbledon 2006, Li also became the first Chinese player to make the quarter-finals of a grand slam singles before losing to Kim Clijsters.

This week Li demolished number nine seed Dinara Safina 6-2, 6-2 in the Australian Open to set up a fourth-round match against former world number one Martin Hingis. Li claimed before the match she was not awed by Hingis and welcomed the challenge. Just to prove it, she raced through the first set 6-4 before losing the second 6-3.

Pressure - it comes in many shapes and forms. How we handle it invariably defines our being, particularly for professional athletes. Early in her career, Li was known as being temperamental and rebellious. Despite winning a tier three event and doing well in a number of other highly rated tournaments, the good folks from the China Tennis Association (CTA) felt Li was her own worst enemy.

For her part, the young Li saw something entirely different. She was travelling the world to play in tennis events and in the process getting the type of education rarely afforded most people in China.

'The challenge for the CTA increases when girls like Li Na have been out on the tour for a while,' says Rob Smith, a former coach on both the men's and women's pro tours and now the director of tennis at the Aberdeen Marina Club. 'They see what the difference is in terms of coaches and how they are treated and it has a profound effect on them.'

What Li saw was that not all coaches yelled and screamed, and some used alternative methods to build up a young player's fragile confidence.