Every athlete has a story: Maja Chwalinska’s is about vulnerability and toughness

Her smile as gentle and enigmatic as her drop shots, Maja Chwalinska sits on a sofa in the players’ lounge at the Singapore Tennis Open, polite and poised proof of the oldest rule in sport: Every player has a story. A story that’s usually laced with toughness and lined with vulnerability for the athletes’ life is a compressed adventure of defiance, withstanding and overcoming.

The surprising and resourceful French Open finalist from Poland is small in tennis terms, or as she elegantly puts it, “not the highest or the strongest”. She’s just 164cm, but let’s put it like this: If she’s low in centimetres, she’s high in IQ. She flits across court like an irritated bee, and to a sport of pistons and hammers she brings a chisel and paintbrush.