At the end of a season when Diede de Groot has created history on multiple levels, there’s little surprise that a raft of year-end sports award nominations and wins have come her way, the most recent being crowned this week as Best Female at the IPC Paralympic Sports Awards.  

Double Paralympic gold medallist at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games, the first female wheelchair tennis player to complete the calendar Grand Slam and - at the end of a year when the Tokyo Paralympics was the undoubted highlight – the first female wheelchair tennis player to complete the Golden Slam, it has been quite the year for the 24-year-old, who completed her season by adding the NEC Wheelchair Singles and UNIQLO Wheelchair Doubles Masters titles.

"It was very special. Looking back at it, when I stood on the podium and the medals were brought in, I saw the medal on the plate and I was like 'Oh, it's mine. That's officially mine'. I am very proud to be a double Paralympic champion," said De Groot on being announced the winner during the virtual awards ceremony and becoming only the second wheelchair tennis player after Esther Vergeer (in 2013) to be named Best Female.

 ‘Special’ is a word that crops up time and time again when the world No. 1, also named as ITF World Champion for the third time this week, reflects on a year that saw her lose only one of her 42 singles matches and only two of 26 doubles matches.

“It was not an exact goal of mine, but then to accomplish it after such an intense time on the tour, everything (the emotion) just came out all at once and it was a very special feeling for me," says De Groot as she talks of the Golden Slam – winning the Australian Open, Roland Garros, Wimbledon, the US Open and the Paralympic gold medal all in the same year.

“In the moment itself I think it was mainly relief, but afterwards I always have this little realisation moment with myself in the locker room,” she adds. “You breathe a few times and then you’re like ‘Yes, I’ve done it’ and that’s when the joy comes in and all the happiness comes out.”

Intensity on the tour is something that De Groot has become increasingly accustomed to in recent seasons. In 2019 she was already facing questions from journalists and speculation about the possibility of her completing the Golden Slam when she arrived at Wimbledon as the first wheelchair tennis player to then hold all four Grand Slam singles titles at the time same, although across two seasons. However, the weight of expectation and the pressure De Groot was placing on herself proved too much and her hopes of a third Wimbledon singles title came to an end in the final two years ago.

Add a global pandemic and the Tokyo Paralympics into the mix and the pressure and intensity ramps up several notches. De Groot readily admits how tough it has been.

“Going into 2021 I was mainly just focused on playing a lot of good tennis and, I think, especially in the first few months, January through to the end of Roland Garros, I was very focused on what I had to do and it was all going very well,” she says.

“But then as the focus switched a little bit towards the summer, the Games coming closer as well, you notice how everyone just starts asking you different questions about the Games and I was still denying it and not putting a lot of focus on it," De Groot continues. "Even though I was trying to get it out of my head, other people were putting it in my head. So it has been a very difficult year, despite how it’s turned out. I had nothing to complain about, but it was very difficult mentally. It was definitely different, but I gained so much experience from the whole year, so it’s been good.

“I think the toughest part was the period coming towards Tokyo when I was very scared of everything I saw in the news,“ adds De Groot. “Holland wasn’t doing very well with Covid and then hearing some stories of the Dutch Olympic team where they had a few Covid cases in the team, it worried me a lot and I didn’t see my parents for about three weeks before leaving for Tokyo. I really didn’t see anyone and that was very difficult for me because you want to enjoy those few weeks at home before you go off to try and do something incredible, but I was even very scared to go to the supermarket. You know that so many things depend on it.”

While concerns over Covid-19 may have been towards the forefront of De Groot’s mind in the few weeks before flying out to Tokyo, conversely the effects of the pandemic allowed her time for more training in the earlier part of the season, to the extent that she feels she produced some of her best tennis on the clay courts of France in June, when she won back-to-back Grand Slam and Super Series titles at Roland Garros and the French Riviera Open.

“In terms of a title or a victory, I will never forget Tokyo, but in terms of how I felt and how I was playing, the clay season and Roland Garros was very good for me,” she says. “I was really on top of my game, I was very confident and I was playing a different style of tennis, as well. It was a style I really liked and I’m definitely trying to seek that again for next year and I think it will be a lot of fun if I can add some different things to my game.”

Overseeing De Groot’s training since they first came together as coach and student in October 2014 is former Dutch professional and Billie Jean King Cup player Amanda Hopmans.

“Especially in the beginning she really helped me to take the next step to being a professional athlete,” says De Groot. “So to start with maybe I was a little bit late to training, or I forgot to take a spare tyre to training and I popped a tyre during a session with no replacement. Those were the little things she taught me.

“Those are your essentials,” she continues. “You need to be ready if things go wrong, you need to be on time and you need to be a little bit more strict as an athlete towards yourself because then you can look after yourself, but also prove to others that you’re prepared to work for this.”

Part of De Groot’s development to becoming the player she is today were the Cruyff Foundation European Junior Wheelchair Tennis Camps in the Netherlands and Belgium, while in 2013 she won the first of two Cruyff Foundation Junior Masters singles titles.

Being able to give back to the sport is important to De Groot, so much so that in 2019, having just become the first wheelchair tennis player to hold all four Grand Slam singles titles at the same time after her first Roland Garros title, she was straight back in the car with Hopmans to return to their home tennis centre in Alphen aan den Rijn to inspire a new generation of players at a junior camp organised by the Esther Vergeer Foundation.

“I was so excited, I wanted to go on the camp myself, but I realised I was too old,” she recalls. “When I had the chance to go back and meet these kids and actually have some fun myself, I genuinely remember how it was to play myself at their age. I wanted to see that joy; I thought it would help me and it did. It gave me back so much and I think the example of where I am now really helps those kids, so it was important for them, but also for myself.”

While that camp in 2014 gave De Groot the chance to relax and have fun in between winning back-to-back Grand Slam and Super Series titles in France, since this year's NEC Singles Masters and UNIQLO Doubles Masters in Orlando she has finally had a chance to relax and have some downtime. Part of her time away from training included the opportunity to meet Billie Jean King in New York.

“It was very special to meet her. She is such an inspiring woman. She’s done so much for the sport and the way she spoke to me was lovely,” says De Groot. “She told me I should pop her a message if ever I needed help and her willingness to go that extra mile to help people is very impressive and something very special in this world. What I also find impressive is that with all the thing she has going on she knows exactly what is going on (with wheelchair tennis) and she still follows everyone, she know what you’re doing, she knows what you’ve accomplished.”

Since returning to the Netherlands and before returning to training for 2022, De Groot has enjoyed ‘time on the sofa talking to friends and just being Diede the human and not Diede the athlete’. She turns 25 this weekend and as she looks forward to new challenges and new things to try and achieve in her next quarter of a century she is hoping for a little more of a relaxed season in 2022.

“I’m really very excited to have that little bit of a release of that intensity we had in the year leading up to Tokyo. I’m just hoping that it will be a bit more relaxed through the year, but then also picking up that level and starting where I was a few months ago (in France) and enjoying playing again and hopefully I can do that.”

As for the future of the sport she is currently dominating, like many of the fellow Dutch women’s players before her, De Groot says: “I hope that there will be bigger draws at the Grand Slams sometime soon, but also that there will be more tournaments combined with the ATP or WTA. I think that would be very good for us as wheelchair tennis players, as that would give us a lot more people watching and a lot more acknowledgement for what we do.

“But generally, I hope that everyone keeps on training and trying to be better every day and then the level will go up even more. To see some of the younger players who are coming up beating some of the older players in the next three years (before Paris 2024) would be nice, too, so hopefully we’ll have some of that.”