Esther Vergeer hit the ball during the women's singles gold medal match at the Beijing Paralympic Games, September 14, 2008 (PHOTO BY WANG XIANG)

Esther Vergeer, a Dutch wheelchair tennis player, is probably the most appropriate person to demonstrate the definition of dominance in any kind of sport: she is five-fold Paralympics tennis gold medallist, eight-fold consecutive world champion. Unbeaten since January 30, 2003, she has won 132 singles and 117 doubles titles as of August 6, 2008; her overall record is 547 wins and 25 losses in singles, and 373 wins and 27 losses in doubles.

Born on July 18, 1981 in Woerden, the Netherlands, Vergeer became paraplegic when she was 8 years old due to an otherwise successful, very risky surgery concerning hemorrhaging blood vessels around her spinal cord. During the rehab, she learned to play basketball in parallel with tennis in a wheelchair. After playing basketball for several years at club level, she played with the Dutch national youth team that won the European championship in 1997.

Vergeer started tennis training in 1994, made her international tournament debut in 1996, and switched to full-time tennis athlete in 1998, because "tennis meant a bigger challenge."

Her first big win was at the U.S. Open Championships in 1998, moving her from 15th to 2nd in the world ranking. She has been the world's top ranked player since April 6, 1999.

The year 2008 has been special for Vergeer. On February 7, she was appointed as the ambassador of the International Paralympic Committee, promoting the Paralympic Movement together with other 10 disabled athletes around the world. On February 18, the five-time nominee received her second Laureus Award for Sportsperson with a Disability of the Year (the first one was in 2002) in St. Petersburg in Russia. On June 15, the Dutch won the World Team Cup in Italy. On September 6, she was selected as the flag bearer of the Dutch delegation at the opening ceremony of the 13th Paralympic Games in Beijing, kicking off her third Paralympic Games after Sydney and Athens.

On September 14, Vergeer reached the singles gold medal final without losing a set. The road to her fifth Paralympic victory, however, was far from smooth. That was when the pressure started to tell, as she described to Beijing Review:

"I was quite nervous before going to the gold medal match. I kept saying to myself that you should not think about the gold medal and it was just a final. Up until the second half of the second set, it was still good. But then I got scared; I didn't dare to hit the ball any more. The tension in my body was building up and my arms were heavy. I just pushed the ball, instead of hitting it, and hoped it would fall in."

The person who brought such great pressure on Vergeer was her compatriot Korie Homan, 22, world number 2. The Paralympic debutant