World domination tends to be the domain of the superpowers. The bigger the country, the more money there is invested, the better the chance there is of taking over the globe. The same formula can be applied to every field, from trade to the military to sport, and yet formulas do not always work.

Great Britain’s annual tennis budget could write off the debt of many a small, third world country and yet they have not produced a British male Wimbledon champion since 1936. The United States has a massive pool of more than 250 million citizens from which to select potential winners and yet moans that it cannot produce champions on a regular basis.

Then there is little Serbia: a brand new nation of less than 10 million souls; a land torn apart by war in 1991, flattened by the NATO bombing raids of 1999, and still emerging from the wreckage of the former Yugoslavia. Yet it has produced three world-class players in Ana Ivanovic, Novak Djokovic and Jelena Jankovic, together with a small gaggle of support characters who lurk just outside the elite ranks.

Of those, Ivanovic was the first to make her debut in a Grand Slam final, reaching the last Saturday of the French Open this year—and she is the one the photographers love to snap. To realize their potential, each of the ‘Big Three’ went abroad with Ivanovic training in Switzerland, Djokovic moving to Germany, and Jankovic heading for the U.S. But all three are fiercely proud of their country and regard their fame and fortune as a way of spreading the word about the wonders of Serbia.

All three are remarkably driven and ferociously competitive yet extremely good company. Polite, friendly and bright, the ‘Big Three’ keep tabs on the others’ progress with Ivanovic and Djokovic--just six months apart in age--being particularly close. Serbia is proud of them, too, and when Ivanovic led the gang of three home to Belgrade after reaching the final of the French Open, she and her two compatriots were cheered to the rafters.

“It was an experience I will never forget,” Ivanovic said. “On Sunday we arrived in Belgrade in the afternoon and they waited for us in the airport. Djokovic, Jankovic and me, they took us to the parliament house in the center of the city. In the square were about 10,000, 15,000 people to welcome us. It was (an) unbelievable feeling because they used to do that for basketball or volleyball players when they would win gold medals. This was one of the first times they organized something for individual athletes. That was a thrilling moment.”

Coming from such a small country, Ivanovic was instantly recognizable when she first started out. Like Djokovic, she had her every move followed in the press and the people back home expected her to gain instant success. That made her early years anything but easy.

“Back home people did not talk much about tennis when we were young,” she recalled. “Now, because of us, it is much more popular, but that puts pressure on [you when you get inconsistent results]. I expected to do better which was a bit of a problem. I put too much pressure on myself. It takes time. Now I feel I am going the right way. At the end of the day, it’s most important how you feel inside and the people you trust.”

One of the people she trusts is Djokovic. Despite his disappointment in losing to Rafael Nadal in Paris, he stayed on to watch his friend face Justine Henin in the Roland Garros final. Such camaraderie helps them both as they trail around the world, fighting for ranking points and for their places in the pecking order.

“The first time I met Novak we were both four years old,” Ivanovic said. “His uncle went to school with my father, and they owned a restaurant in the mountains. My family went on a holiday there. We played, and then a few years later we met again playing tennis. It’s unbelievable. We didn’t have good facilities and the tennis federation didn’t support us as they should.

“It’s pretty amazing that we all came such a long way to compete at an international level. It’s a very thrilling feeling and good motivation for the younger kids. They know it’s possible and hopefully people will invest more.”

Even though their schedules put them in different cities, Ivanovic and Djokovic manage to stay close. “I keep in touch with Novak,” she said. “He calls to congratulate me. Sometimes you get a little bit lonely. It’s nice to speak my own language. Sometimes I think I have not spoken Serbian for such a long time, after speaking to my coaches in English.”

At the moment she is working on a part-time basis with Sven Groeneveld, the former guide to Mary Pierce, Nathalie Dechy, Michael Stich and Greg Rusedski. Groeneveld also worked with Roger Federer when the Swiss was a junior and is partly responsible for developing the No. 1’s devastating forehand.

With Groeneveld’s help, a little experience and the input of the coaches at the Sanchez-Casals Academy in Barcelona—Ivanovic’s occasional training base during the clay court season—she has blossomed this year. And thanks to her run in Paris, a semifinal spot at Wimbledon, the title in Berlin, and a runner-up place in Tokyo, she is now established in the Top 5.

“Sven has worked in tennis for a long time and has so much experience,” she said. “I really respect the advice he gives me, but I wouldn’t say he is my ‘coach’ like the other ones I had. We don’t talk much about tactics, but he has many small pieces of advice that he can give me and he has definitely helped.”
It is all a far cry from her first introduction to the sport. As a four-year-old, she was watching Monica Seles on television and, with her fifth birthday on the way, she was dreaming of possible presents. Spotting a commercial for a local tennis club, she memorized the phone number and asked her mother to call and book her a lesson.

“Then for my fifth birthday in November, my father bought me a small tennis racket as a birthday present,” Ivanovic said. “And that year in December, I started practicing. That was my happiest moment—when he brought me that tennis racket.”

But just as Ivanovic began to take her chosen sport seriously, so international affairs interfered. She was just 11 when the NATO bombing raids began on Belgrade and, with the country in turmoil, tennis was the last thing on anyone’s mind.

“In ‘99, when the bombing was, I was a little bit afraid,” she said. “But then by the time you got used to it, you realized that they are not bombing just everything, only special buildings. So after a month, I started practicing and that was good because, during the practice you could not think about what was happening, you were getting into doing something else. So that was good.

“But also, afterwards, the problem was to get visas, travel. Even now I have so many problems to get visa(s) to go abroad to tournament(s). When we are signing to go somewhere, they want us to use nationality ‘Serbia’, but then (on) our passport it’s ‘Yugoslavia.’”

Nothing, though, could dampen Ivanovic’s passion for the sport. She made her breakthrough as a 17-year-old, winning the Canberra title and reaching the quarterfinals at the French Open in 2005, but then hit a plateau as she tried to adapt to the pressures and the lifestyle of a professional athlete. Even so, the frustrations and disappointments made no difference to her basic enthusiasm.

Not needing to be told that the harder she worked, the sooner she would achieve her goals, she set her sights on a place in the Top 10 and, now that that has been reached, she is eyeing up the No. 1 spot. And slowly, she is beginning to realize that she belongs on top of the heap. She may have been felled by stagefright in her first Grand Slam final, but merely getting there proved she could compete with the very best.

“The French Open is very special for me, but I guess every Slam is different,” she said. “On the first year of the tour I was like Alice in Wonderland. I didn’t know what was happening. I thought I was dreaming. Then you become more familiar and become one of them.”

Gradually, the world is becoming more familiar with Ivanovic and her Serbian colleagues. World domination, it seems, is not just for the superpowers.