August 2025

It’s been a long and winding road to the top 20 for Head ambassador Liudmila Samsonova, but the Russian who grew up in Italy has now firmly established herself at the top of women’s tennis after proving herself on all surfaces.

The two-nation player with great results on three surfaces

Listen to Liudmila Samsonova pronounce her name, and you think she’s Italian. The way she leans on the second syllable of her surname betrays a life spent in Italy, yet she has won the biggest team prize in women’s tennis for Russia, and is totally comfortable with that.

She is also equally comfortable on grass, clay or hard courts, having reached the quarter-finals at Wimbledon, the fourth round at Roland-Garros and the US Open, and won titles on hard and grass. Her sense of belief has taken a long time to firm up, but finally shone through in a glorious six weeks in the middle of 2025.

Samsonova was born in Olenegorsk, a town north of the Arctic Circle whose name means ‘Reindeer Mountain’ and whose economy is built around iron ore processing. But she left shortly after her first birthday when her father, a professional table tennis player, was signed by a team in Turin, Italy.

Samsonova chose tennis over her father’s sport (she says she would probably have been an ice skater if she had stayed in Russia), and with help from the local federation, she began training at the Piatti Tennis Centre between San Remo and Monaco. Later, she moved her training base to Rome.

As a junior, she had an Italian flag next to her name, and having lived all but a year of her life in Italy and always had Italian coaches, she is effectively a product of Italy. But she never opted to play for Russia over Italy. When her family enquired about getting an Italian passport, bureaucratic complications became a deal-breaker. So despite playing junior tennis as an Italian, she has never officially been Italian.

“I grew up in Italy so I’m more Italian than Russian,” she said in an interview for the Behind the Racquet online video series, “but I didn’t switch to playing for Russia at 18 – I had no chance to switch. I didn’t have the Italian passport, so it was not my choice.”

That clarification about her nationality came at a particularly difficult time in Samsonova’s career. Three years earlier, at 15, she had won the title in only her fourth professional tournament, a $10,000 ITF event in Rome, yet by 18 she was still ranked outside the top 1000.

While still a teenager, the Covid-19 pandemic struck, closing the professional tennis circuit for five months in 2020. During the break, Samsonova questioned her motivation, wondering if she should continue on an increasingly challenging journey she wasn’t sure she still had faith in. She isolated herself in her room for a week, grappling with the question that would determine her life’s path. She found the answer: tennis was the only thing she really wanted to do. And so she set out with renewed determination.

Her big breakthrough came in Berlin in 2021 when she won her first tour-level singles title. She finished that year helping Russia win the Billie Jean King Cup, going unbeaten in two singles and three doubles matches in the team tennis week, and being named the most valuable player and BJK Cup rookie of the year. By her 24th birthday a year later, she was in the top 20 after a virtually unbeatable streak of play in the second half of the 2022 season which saw her win titles in Washington, Cleveland and Tokyo.

Speaking now about her early struggles, she admits she didn’t know who she was. “I think every person is growing and maturing in a different time, it's different for everyone,” she explained after reaching the 2025 Wimbledon quarter-finals. “I think I'm starting to know very well who I am, which player I am, and everything. The puzzle is coming together. I think this is the result of all the work that I've done in the past years. It's tough to compete every week when you are just growing and you have many things in your head.”

Even after 2022, Samsonova still struggled for consistency, but finally strung the results together in the middle of 2025. She reached the final on the clay of Strasbourg, posted her best-ever result at Roland-Garros (round of 16), reached the semi-finals in Berlin having beaten the third-ranked Jessica Pegula from match point down, and then reached the last eight at Wimbledon, an experience she described as “really emotional”. She recalled, “I remember I was here in juniors, and I was watching the best players in the world. It was amazing. I was thinking, ‘Oh, wow, it can be amazing if I can get there one day.’ I was dreaming.”

Having posted impressive results on all three of tennis’s professional surfaces, and learned who she is, the only thing holding back Samsonova now is consistency. She can play superbly on one day but doesn’t always back it up, although she says her French Open and Wimbledon successes in 2025 are making her stronger. “I can play more matches on a high level now,” she said at Wimbledon. “I think I'm becoming a stronger player. Slowly, but I think yes.”

Words by Stephanie Myles and Chris Bowers