World No.123 Lulu Sun (born Radovcic) has an incredible multinational background. The Wimbledon quarterfinalist was born in New Zealand to a Chinese mother, Lele, and a Croatian father. But the story of her multicultural upbringing doesn’t end there. Let’s delve into the interesting details.
Lulu Sun was born in April 2001 as Lulu Radovcic “at the end of the world,” in Te Anau, a very small town in New Zealand that, according to Sun, has “practically more sheep and deer than people.” She lived there with her mom and maternal grandmother, who had bought the property a few years before her birth. Sun then briefly lived in Shanghai before moving to Switzerland, enabling her to add French to the English and Mandarin she speaks fluently. She is also working on her Korean and Japanese and learned some Spanish in school.
Explaining how her diverse heritage has shaped her character, Sun said: “Chinese obviously from my mum’s side is very disciplined, hard-working. From my dad’s side, Croatian, he’s from the seaside, so very laid back and calm. I guess that’s a good combo.
“Also, I think from my mum’s side I get that feistiness and competitiveness. And then the Swiss side is, like, neutral, yeah (laughing). Then from New Zealand, I get that adventure side.”
The 23-year-old doesn’t fit into any single culture completely but appreciates her international heritage, “I think I’m lucky to have all these backgrounds behind me. From an early age I got to see the world and get to know it through my family. When you have so many cultures behind you, you don’t really 100% fit into one. Sometimes when I was growing up, it was really hard to fit into one specific culture. But now I’ve grabbed different parts of different cultures and they somehow became me. I’m not fighting it, I’m not trying to be a specific culture.”
After high school in Switzerland, Sun moved to the United States in 2019, where she studied political science at the University of Texas and completed her degree in three rather than four years. There, she led the tennis team to the NCAA championship.
In March 2024, Sun officially decided to represent New Zealand in the tennis world, partly incentivised by the opportunity to represent the country at the Olympics this summer. Her stepfather, Sinclair Hoffmann, who is from Devon, played a crucial role in helping her make the difficult decision of whether to play for Switzerland or New Zealand. “It was going back and forth, and it is such a tough decision because it is once in your career. You can’t go back from that,” Sun once said.
Sun started working with Slovak coach Vladimir Platenik in October 2023. His first priority was to improve her endurance, so he made her run up and down snowy mountains in Slovakia and then worked on her fitness in warm Florida. Then he also worked on fixing her serve, which he considered very weird, and her backhand. The results were spectacular, as already in January 2024 Sun entered her first Grand Slam at the Australian Open.
Playing just her second main draw of a Grand Slam, Sun became the first New Zealand woman to reach the quarterfinals of Wimbledon. Her ambitions are high: to win Grand Slams and become No.1 in the world. (sources: The New York Times, Essentially Sports)