Former World No. 1 Kim Clijsters, of Belgium, will be leaving Belgium to move to the United States this weekend, according to reports in the Belgian media.
Kim Clijsters to move to the United States
The 37 year old Clijsters will move to the United States along with her husband Brian Lynch and her children.
Lynch, a former basketball player and now coach, is from the United States where his family is based. It is being reported that Lynch could also work with an NBA club once they move. Clijsters was in the United States with her family when the tennis circuit was shutdown and she remained there for a while before coming back to Belgium.
Now, she is set to return to the United States and will continue working on her comeback from there. Clijsters is set to participate in World Team Tennis from July 12 to August 1, an American team competition that will take place in West Virginia for three weeks .The Cincinnati event and the US Open are scheduled to be held in New York in August and it remains to be seen if Clijsters will play in those tournaments.
Kim Clijsters has been a world No. 1 in both singles and doubles, having held both rankings simultaneously in 2003. She has wonsix Grand Slam tournament titles, four in singles and two in doubles. Clijsters became the first Belgian player to attain the No.
1 ranking. She has won 41 singles titles and 11 doubles titles on the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) Tour and was a three-time winner of the WTA Tour Championships. She has won the US Open and the Australian Open in singles and Wimbledon and the French Open in doubles.
Clijsters initially retired from tennis in 2007 at the age of 23 to get married and have a daughter. She returned to the sport two years later and won her second US Open title as an unranked player in just her third tournament on her return.
She defended her title the following year and then won the Australian Open in 2011 en route to becoming the first mother to be ranked No. 1 by the WTA. Along with Margaret Court, she also holds the record for most Grand Slam singles titles won as a mother, with three such titles, and was the first to win one since Evonne Goolagong Cawley in 1980.
Clijsters retired again following the 2012 US Open. Earlier this year, after more than seven years away from the circuit, Clijsters began her second comeback at the Dubai Tennis Championships and the Monterrey event before the tennis shutdown, where she lost in the first round of both events.