Latent heat: Victoria Azarenka

18yo Belarusian Victoria Azarenka is considered one of the biggest promises on women's tennis since 2005, when she captured Australian Open and US Open junior titles, as well as Roland Garros and Wimbledon junior doubles titles and was named ITF Junior World Girls Champion. Then she joined the WTA Tour and was slowly progressing till last year when she got into the Top 30 by reaching two finals (Estoril and Tashkent), Last 16 round in the US Open and getting and emotional win over Maria Sharapova in Moscow.


But this year, her goals look even bigger and she has turned into a more complete and dangerous player. Although she started the year reaching another final in Gold Coast, her results were not too good until two weeks ago, when she reached the 4th final of her career in Prague, which she lost to Vera Zvonareva. But this week she has got the best result of her career so far, reaching the semifinals of the big Tier I held in Berlin, defeating world's #8 Anna Chakvetadze en route. With this result she has broken into the Top 20 reaching a career-high ranking at #19.


Although her gamestyle is quite similar to Maria Sharapova's, with powerful groundstrokes, she has got her best results on clay. She has yet to win a title, but nobody doubts that she will get it soon.

You can watch Victoria's gallery here