Liudmila Samsonova
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60%Born
1998 (25 years old)
Birth Place
Olenegorsk, RussiaPosition
Tennis Player
Status
Active
Ethnicity
White
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Height
1.80 m (5 ft 11 in)
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Side
Right
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TennisTeam
WTA Tour Womens
2nd Team
League
WTA Tour
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Liudmila Dmitriyevna Samsonova (Russian: Людмила Дмитриевна Самсонова, IPA: ; born 11 November 1998) is a Russian tennis player. She also competed for Italy, from 2014 to 2018.
Samsonova has a career-high singles ranking of world No. 19. She won her first WTA Tour title at the 2021 German Open, a WTA 500 title, and has overall won four singles titles on the WTA Tour. She has also won a total of six titles on the ITF Circuit. At the 2020–21 Billie Jean King Cup, Samsonova led the Russian team to their first triumph since 2008, winning all five of her matches in both singles and doubles.
Early life
Samsonova was born 11 November 1998 in the industrial city of Olenegorsk, Murmansk Oblast, Russia. Their family moved with the then-one-year-old Liudmila to Italy. Her father Dmitry, a table tennis player, was invited to play for the club "Ferentino" based in Torino. Her father urged her to start playing either table tennis or lawn tennis, choosing the latter. She started playing tennis at the age of six, joining Riccardo Piatti's tennis academy in Sanremo after the local tennis federation helped her financially with that. Until 2018, Liudmila represented Italy in professional tennis, before switching to the Russian flag.
In July 2021, she explained the reason behind her decision was the extra pressure of competing for the Italian national team, a country where tennis is more followed than in Russia where she feels like competing only for herself, especially considering her "boom boom" hard-hitting game style. Russian sources were more specific about all the reasons behind the unusual switch after turning 18 in the light of significant amount of local players switching from the Russian flag. According to the Tennis Weekend, Samsonova faced problems while trying to obtain an Italian passport and there was a certain shortage of support for her as an immigrant from the Italian Tennis Federation. She keeps practicing outside of Russia, as she is unsatisfied with the condition for professional tennis provided by the Russian Tennis Federation domestically. In October 2021, Samsonova clarified she has never had an Italian citizenship and thus has never faced the option of choosing between the two flags.
Liudmila admitted that if her parents had stayed in Russia she would have chosen figure skating. She speaks Italian as a native language and English as her second one, and her Russian is surprisingly good considering a lack of practice.
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