Kim the In-betweeny

A year in women's tennis that reverberated to the sound of the Williams sisters' menacing strokeplay has ended with a goodly thump from the racket of a 19-year-old Belgian. The forehand drive that Kim Clijsters put away to complete victory over Serena Williams in the final of the tour championship has given a glimmer of hope that 2003 might not see quite so many prizes disappear behind the same front door in Palm Beach Gardens.

Predictably, Williams, who shares a lavishly appointed home with older sister Venus in the Floridian resort, had a ready explanation for why she folded to a 7-5 6-3 defeat against Clijsters in Los Angeles last Monday: she was done in. 'To be honest, I feel like I'm 98 years old,' said Williams, who is in fact 21 and won three of the four grand slams in 2002. 'Everything right now is broke and I'm ready to go home. I'm an old lady in a young woman's body.'

Although no one is doubting the effort put in to the year by Williams, whose recuperation over the next two months will include auditioning for a couple of movies, another explanation that is being touted for her defeat is that Clijsters is a rather good player who may just have the weight of shot to break down the Williamses' domination.

Power is now the name of the women's game. Just ask the once-formidable Martina Hingis, who is so dispirited by how ineffective her fragilely brilliant tennis has become that she is in temporary retirement.

In Clijsters's case, it is a bruising forehand that the others fear. 'All of us are hitting the ball really hard and staying aggressive,' she says. 'I think this is the future of women's tennis.' She dropped just 14 games in winning the four matches that took her to the title in Los Angeles, two of those victories making her only the fourth player to beat Serena and Venus in the same tournament (and the first since Hingis did so nearly two years ago).

Like her boyfriend, Australia's world number one Lleyton Hewitt, whose parents excelled at sport, Clijsters, who was brought up in the small, Flemish-speaking town of Bilzen, is a pedigree athlete. Her father, Leo, played football 40 times for Belgium as a sweeper and helped Mechelen to win the European Cup Winners' Cup, while her mother, Els, was a national junior gymnastics champion. Clijsters likes to say that she inherited her father's footballers' legs and her mother's suppleness.

Her parents knew enough about the pressures of sport not to want to inflict them on their daughter and impressed on her that she should regard tennis as a hobby. Leo Clijsters's indifference towards his daughter's sporting passion is summed up in the story of the day she came home complaining about problems with her forehand. Her father's only response was: 'Kim, which side is forehand?'

The result has been one of the few players at the top of the women's game who is normal. Asked at press conferences about her enduring relationship with Hewitt - she spent barely 72 hours back in Belgium last week before flying out to join her beau in Australia - she indulges in none of the teeth-sucking resentment that others go in for when the questions get personal. 'I'm happy I've got Lleyton and we're together,' she says without embarrassment.

This balanced outlook has helped her to cope noticeably better than most with her innate competitiveness, which she possesses in abundance. 'There are a lot of people who get in the top 20 for a few months and then they are out of there and you don't ever hear from those players again,' she says. 'I always knew I didn't want to be like that.'

She has managed to maintain her place near the top of the world rankings this year, despite shoulder problems and parting from her coach, Carl Maes, who, for domestic reasons, has moved to Britain to work for the Lawn Tennis Association. She is now coached by Marc Dehous, a former mentor, and the shoulder, which accounted for her poor showings at the French Open and Wimbledon, is better, as demonstrated by her unstoppable end-of-season form, which included wins in Filderstadt and Luxembourg, as well as Los Angeles.

No one is suggesting that Clijsters is about to eclipse the Williams girls, but there has been enough evidence from the Belgian teenager this autumn to suggest that all the talk about the sisters having an unassailable physical advantage over their rivals is premature. We have to hope so.