First consecutive calendar-year Grand Slam champion

In 2022, Diede de Groot (Netherlands) made a clean sweep of tennis’ four major singles tournaments for the second year in a row, thus becoming the first tennis player in history – able-bodied or wheelchair-bound – to successfully defend a calendar-year Grand Slam. Her victories in wheelchair singles at the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open took her tally of Grand Slam singles titles to 16 since 2017, and in 2023 she continued where she left off the previous year by winning her 17th singles crown at the Australian Open.

Esther Vergeer, arguably the greatest-ever wheelchair tennis player, had retired before Wimbledon’s inaugural wheelchair singles tournament was held in 2016, and in 2008 and 2012 she was prevented from making a clean sweep at the other majors when the US Open did not hold a tournament for wheelchair singles.

Between 2008 and 2015, men’s wheelchair tennis great Shingo Kunieda was similarly hampered by the absence of Wimbledon and the US Open (in 2008 and 2012) from the tournament calendar.

Margaret Court (women’s singles, 1969–70, and mixed doubles, 1963–65), Steffi Graf (women’s singles, 1988–89), Ken McGregor and Frank Sedgman (men’s doubles, 1951–52) and Martina Navratilova and Pam Shriver (women’s doubles, 1983–84) have all come within one win of completing back-to-back calendar-year Grand Slams.

At the end of the 2023 Australian Open on 29 January – a tournament at which she completed a consecutive hat-trick of doubles titles with compatriot Aniek van Koot – de Groot was a 33-time Grand Slam champion (17 singles, 16 doubles), a six-time Wheelchair Tennis Masters champion (four singles, two doubles) and a two-time Paralympic gold medallist (singles and doubles in 2021). De Groot won her ninth successive Grand Slam singles title at the 2023 Australian Open; combined with her doubles success at the same tournament, it meant that she’d won 16 of the 18 available titles in both wheelchair disciplines since the 2021 Australian Open.