A fascinated British press corps gathered at Heathrow on 13 January 1989. They were there to record the arrival of the first Soviet footballer to be signed by a Football League team. Sergei Baltacha, 30, a midfielder who had won nearly 50 caps for the Soviet Union and had been a stalwart of a highly successful Dynamo Kiev team, was flying in from the Ukraine bound for Ipswich Town of the Second Division. With him were his wife, Olga, an athlete who had also represented the Soviet Union in the pentathlon and heptathlon, and their two children.
In the crush that greeted them, the affable Baltacha smiled dutifully for the cameras and also for the reporters, unable to answer their questions with his smattering of English. Apart from a few admiring glances, five-year-old Elena, the younger of the children, went almost unnoticed. Thirteen years later, on the opening Thursday of the 2002 Wimbledon championships, the roles were spectacularly reversed. Baltacha, now divorced from Olga and living in south London with his new wife, sat unnoticed in the crowd on Court Three as an energetic teenager with a ferocious forehand whipped a compliantly whippable crowd into a state of high patriotic excitement by beating the seeded South African Amanda Coetzer 5-7 6-4 6-2. It was Sergei's daughter Elena, now 18, now a rising sports star in her own right...and now British.
Coetzer may not have been quite the player she was in 1997 when she twice defeated Steffi Graf in grand slams, but she was still a crafty competitor and few doubted the significance of Baltacha's achievement. Here was confirmation that she was indeed one of the most dangerous players among the emerging generation, a Brit with a modern power game. Baltacha - 'Bally' to her many mates on the circuit - loved it. Newspaper photographs the next day showed her celebrating victory by wielding her racket in a manner that made you wonder it was not dripping with blood. 'Wow!' she said later. 'I had so much fun. Oh yeah, there were people going bananas. It made hairs stand up on the back of my neck.'
Baltacha's performance was pretty special in itself, given the risible record of British women in major tournaments, but what made it truly remarkable was the fact that she was still suffering the effects of a series of debilitating illnesses. The sequence included chickenpox and flu, but more often it was tonsillitis that prevented her from practising, let alone playing. Two days after beating Coetzer, Baltacha lost in straight sets to the Russian Elena Likhovtseva, and her coach, Alan Jones, could barely contain his frustration at the havoc the mysterious sequence of ailments was playing with his protégée's fortunes. 'During Wimbledon, I said this is getting a farce,' he recalls. 'Every time we wanted to get her on a practice court, she kept going down with bugs and viruses. And this kid wanted to work hard, wanted to play.'
As it was, the illnesses continued to blight the progress of Britain's most promising female player for a generation, and would take another four months to diagnose properly, let alone cure.
The autumn sun is still not so feeble that the players can't practise outside, but inside the clubhouse at Hazelwood tennis club in Winchmore Hill, north London, where Jones's squad is based, it is chilly. Olga Baltacha, whose life is now devoted to her daughter's career - the pair will soon be moving to a new home in Enfield - suddenly appears with a rug to drape over Elena's knees.
This is the first of a series of meetings we will have in the weeks leading up to Christmas. The idea is to see how Baltacha coped scuffling her way through minor events after those few heady days in Wimbledon's wonderland. As it turns out, I learn as much about the state of Baltacha's health as the state of her game.
By the time she reached the last four of the junior women's singles at Wimbledon in 2001, Baltacha was already into the cycle of illnesses that persuaded Jones that what was needed was a thorough screening. She had previously had blood tests for glandular fever, but after another bout of tonsillitis in America, Jones called for something more exhaustive. Baltacha had hoped to compete in the 2002 US Open but had to pull out of the lead-up tournament and then, feeling lousy, lost in qualifying.
'I get a phone call when she's at a tournament in Glasgow,' Jones recalls, 'and the doctor says, "Alan, I want her back now." He relented to the extent that he allowed her to play the tournament, but when I asked if I could push her he said, "Absolutely not."'
The doctor tells them that the germ that has been causing the endless bouts of tonsillitis has been identified - Elena's system contains four times the normal level of the bacterium streptococcus - but this is of secondary importance to finding out what is wrong with the liver. This alarms Jones: 'Uh oh, 19, liver. Hepatitis. Where have you been?' In late September, he goes with Olga and Elena to the liver specialist, who, after implying 'she had been drinking more than George Best', tells Olga to bring him every item of medication that Elena had taken. On their next visit, the specialist announces: 'It's a very rare situation, but instead of killing the germs, the antibiotics have been attacking her liver.'
In early November she has her tonsils removed. 'The bloke who took them out said that even if Bally hadn't been allergic to antibiotics the germ was so well entrenched it would never have been cured,' Jones says. 'They were almost the worst tonsils he had ever seen.' At the same time, the specialist tells her things were improving but it could still take more than a year for the liver to be restored to normal.
Baltacha has vague memories of arriving at Heathrow with her parents. 'I remember getting off the plane,' she says, 'and seeing all these media people and all these cameras. I was thinking, "Whoa, what's going on?"' She speaks with an accent that is hard to place. A form of Geordie, possibly? 'That's what everyone says.'
Perhaps that's because she started out in Ipswich and moved with the family to Scotland, and it's a sort of in-between accent? 'Yeah, they say that too.' She laughs. She laughs a lot, which is a relief because, in those glasses of hers, she can look fearsomely earnest on court. And aggressive.
She had just been involved in a tetchy incident during a tournament that she won in Felixstowe. Lucy Ahl, her British opponent, complained that Elena was being coached by Olga from the sidelines - which is not allowed - and that the pair covered it up by speaking in Russian. Baltacha says that all her mother was doing was offering her water. 'I should have spoken in English,' Elena says. 'It was my fault. But it wasn't as if it was a conversation: it was like she offered me some water and I said, "No thank you." We [she and Ahl] are both so eager and competitive, and although we are great mates, it was just a spur of the moment kind of clash.'
It was reported she swore at Ahl. 'To be honest I can't believe I said that. When she [Lucy] said to the umpire, "She's getting coaching," I said, "Lucy, piss off, get a life" - that sort of thing. But I didn't mean it. She's my mate.' Given the fluency of Baltacha's English, it's surprising to hear that she began speaking it only reluctantly. 'My mum had to bribe me. I was really stubborn. I was like, "Oh no, I'm not going to." But I really liked this Pink Panther bike and mum said, "I'll get that for you if you start speaking English." So I did.'
Less than two years after arriving her language problems became even more complicated when her father was transferred to St Johnstone, then of the Scottish Premier League. Born in Kiev, raised in Ipswich and Perth, does she feel Ukrainian, English or Scottish? 'I feel so this and that and everything mixed together. Just a mix. But it's lovely because everywhere we've been living and staying, we've always felt very welcome.' And she's happy to represent Britain? 'Yes, I play for the British flag - I definitely play for the Union Jack.'
Her appetite for smashing a ball with a racket developed in the garden in Ipswich after her mother bought her one of those games with a ball on a string. 'I had this heavy black plastic racket and I loved it. I was smacking the ball everywhere. Mum would say come and have your dinner and I'd say, "No, no, no." I was really hyper.' Just over the garden fence was Bob Shelley's badminton court. 'She was always full of energy,' says Shelley, who is still a close family friend. 'After school she'd come over and say, "Bob play badminton, Bob play badminton," and she'd wear me out, wear her father out, wear her mother out, wear her brother out - and still wanted to play more.'
In Scotland, Elena acquired her first serious coach, Jimmy Mackechnie, who taught at Perth tennis club. 'She liked to be the centre of attraction,' he says. 'If there was a centre court and someone asked if she wanted to play on an outside court or centre court, even if she thought she would lose, she would still want to play on centre court. She wasn't frightened to lose and that was one of her things. So you always knew she had this thing that you couldn't give her. She had a quality that's either there or it's not there.'
By the time she left Mackechnie to join Jones in London, Baltacha had already become the youngest player, at 15, to win the Scottish women's indoor title. Jones had spotted her two years before at a tournament in Glasgow. 'I saw this young lady that was raw [he draws the word out to emphasise just how raw] talent,' says Jones. 'She had a big serve, a big heart and a big idea. Everything was big. She wanted to be a big shot and didn't want the ball to come back. She was "YES" in your face. Almost in the knock-up she was in the person's face.'
We meet up again in mid-October. Relieved that the causes of her poor health have been diagnosed, Baltacha has decided to play in an international event in Southampton. If she wins two matches here she will almost certainly have done enough to qualify for the main tour events in Australia and New Zealand at the start of 2003. She is seeded third, but that does not take into account how little she has been able to play in the previous weeks. A few days earlier, Jones had told me: 'She hasn't practised for a month and if she does play she may be so bloody awful it's a joke. But it doesn't matter - at least she's back doing what she wants to do most of all.'
In the players' lounge, she seems relaxed enough, tinkering with her CV on her laptop. She admits, though, that her opening match against the Italian Valentina Sassi is a difficult one. She loses the first set 6-2 but hits her way out of trouble to win the next two. The all-important second victory over Raluca Sandu of Romania looks to have eluded her when she drops the second set and goes a break down in the third. She retrieves the break only to go match point down in the tiebreaker when she makes a complete hash of a simple volley. She then plays a wonderful point to stave off defeat, hits a huge ace to set up her own match point and Sandu is beaten 6-4 2-6 7-6 in just under three hours. 'How she's done it without practice or playing is beyond me,' says Jones. 'It is a reflection of what the girl brings to tennis.'
It is also the last competitive singles match she will play in 2002. The next day in Southampton she tweaks a muscle in her back picking her rackets out of Jones's car. Jones pulls her out of the singles in the national championships in Bolton, but lets her play in the doubles, which she wins with Julie Pullin.
Within a fortnight of her tonsils being taken out Elena is practising again and in early December goes for a week's workout at the Lawn Tennis Association's warm-weather base at La Manga in Spain. Jones is impressed: 'I thought this week was going to be a bit of sun for her and an occasional hit, but she's getting a lot out of herself.'
Elena ends 2002 feeling better than she has for months. 'I'm on the mend for sure,' she says before flying out to New Zealand two days before Christmas, having been granted a wild-card entry into this month's Australian Open, the year's first grand slam. This may be too early for her to regain her best form. However, she would not be travelling so far were she not confident of putting up a decent showing, and she remains, by general consent, Britain's most convincing contender for a place among the elite of the women's tennis since...well, since Jo Durie - who is accompanying Baltacha on her trip Down Under, and whom Jones guided into the upper echelons of the women's game nearly 20 years ago.
This year should establish whether Baltacha really is the exceptional player many good judges believe her to be - or just another of those chimeras in which British tennis specialises. Jimmy Mackechnie has no doubt she can go well beyond her current world ranking of 157. 'What she's achieved so far is what I thought she could achieve,' he says. 'She can quite easily go into the top 100 in the world and I think she will.'
'The problem Bally's up against,' says Jones, 'is that British players have been winning in a very poor competitive base at home, which doesn't actually count for much in the bigger spectrum. It's a base that I think kills our players. Too many think they're something when they're actually not. And parents think the same and, naively, coaches do too. And that's one of the areas she's had to fight hard against.' The next part of that fight starts now in Australia, a country that likes nothing more than to incinerate the aspirations of British sportsmen and women. But whatever the outcome there, Elena Baltacha is winning the struggle that matters most - the one against her own body.
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AHA STAY ON THESE ROADS
Imogen Heap - Aha! (Lyrics)
