Women have certai­nly never hit harder and not just on account of improved equipment. They’re stronger, bigger, faster, better trained and pushed above all by the example of the Williams sisters. Serena, glorious and musclebound, and Venus, long-limbed and tall, have redefined the sport around power. Years ago, tennis writers used to call Martina Navratilova, listed at 5-foot-8 and lean, a giantess with popping veins because other women seemed weaklings by comparison. Now most tour players would dwarf her. In large part what makes Henin, at 5-foot-5, such an exception on the tour and such fun to watch is that she’s nearly always David against the rising tide of Goliaths.

“When I started, all the top players thought the Grand Slams began in the quarterfinals, because the early rounds were so easy and we only had to give 50 per cent to get through them,” Kim Clijsters, Belgium’s other tennis superstar, told me when we sat down to talk one day at Wimbledon. “Now I have to be at least 85 to 90 per cent at my best from the beginning of a tournament. Venus and Serena raised the bar for everyone. We all had to go back to the gym. Younger players saw that, and now they’re hitting harder and harder.”

This is a basic truth about the Williamses, held among professional watchers of the sport as well as players. Venus says it herself: “Serena and I did change the game, and it’s interesting to see people on court now trying to do all our moves. To be that person, the one who changed the game, wow, that’s too good to be true.”

Lately, it has been Serena, the top-ranked woman, who has dominated the field, but a foot injury forced her to withdraw from the US Open, the last major tournament of the year. Pretenders have come and gone in recent years, capitalising on the sisters’ irregular schedules, as well as on Henin’s absence, before succumbing to injury or nerves or simply retiring. When, for a while, both Henin and Clijsters, who quit in 2007 to have a baby, were gone, the game looked bereft of its only serious challengers.

Clijsters is now back, defending her US Open title in New York. That, so shortly after coming out of retirement, she could have won at all last year signalled to some sceptics how thin on the ground are the women capable of actually winning majors. With Henin suffering a partial ligament fracture to her right elbow in a match against Clijsters at Wimbledon and now out of commission for the rest of the year, one of those few women is missing, again.

But back, too, from shoulder trouble, is Maria Sharapova, the Russian champion, the quintessential baseline basher with razor-sharp ball-striking abilities.

At the same time, Caroline Wozniacki, a young Dane, has fought her way close to the top, joining Vera Zvonareva, Victoria Azarenka and veterans like Elena Dementieva, Svetlana Kuznetsova, Jelena Jankovic and Samantha Stosur. The feel-good match of the year, at the French Open in June, pitted Stosur, 26, against Francesca Schiavone, 29, a wry, extroverted Italian, both favorites on tour with all-around games, rarities among the women these days, and both sharing the unusual condition of not being one or the other of the Williams sisters in a Grand Slam final. Schiavone wept after winning. Even Stosur conceded the contest was special.

Yet the very exceptional quality of that match — its variety and unpredictability — served to reinforce sceptics’ views that women’s tennis, based on grinding power, is for better and worse all about the greatness and influence of the Williams sisters.

Which is to say that it’s not common these days to find women with their range: with the defensive skills to neutralise the big serves, or an accomplished net game or a good second serve. Many women’s matches get bogged down with baseline exchanges — a criticism that might be levelled at the men’s matches except that, as Federer put it after losing to Andy Murray in the final of the Rogers Cup in Toronto earlier this month, the men, in general, are more evenly matched. They “don’t have the margins like maybe exist in women’s tennis,” whereby players like the Williamses “can just come out and maybe dominate an opponent every single time,” Federer said. “That doesn’t happen in the men’s game.”

— International Herald Tribune