Retiring Hingis heads to school for a new career

While brushing up her English at a Zurich college whose standard she compares to Cambridge University, the 22-year-old Martina Hingis has no trouble finding words to express why she cannot imagine playing competitive tennis ever again.

"When you have been world No 1 for four years you cannot content yourself with less," Hingis, who has chronic inflammation in both feet after surgery to her ankles, said yesterday. "I have been at the top for long enough to exactly know what it means, and I am incapable of it."

Having won £18m in prize-money and millions more from advertising and endorsements since she turned professional at the age of 14, Hingis is planning a new career. "At the moment my priority in life is no longer tennis but studying," she said. "I am going to school three times a week. It's a very high level school, especially in English, it's like Cambridge University. I want to get my English to such a standard that I can get a job in marketing or something."

Hingis and her lawyers have a £25m lawsuit pending in Milan against Sergio Tacchini, the Italian sportwear manufacturer, with whom she had a five-year sponsorship deal. Hingis claimed she had been provided with "defective" shoes "unsuitable for competition". Tacchini said the claim had been made only so Hingis could avoid paying damages for breaching her contract with the company.

Emphasising that a return to tennis was "unimaginable," Hingis, the youngest Wimbledon singles champion since Lottie Dod at 15 in 1887 (Hingis was 16 years, nine months and five days when she won the title in 1997), told L' Equipe: "I have stopped training because my health doesn't allow me to do it any more. When I play, I play for two hours, but only once a day because of the pain."

Hingis, whose quality of tennis transported spectators above the technology-assisted biff-bang-wallop that pervades much of the women's game nowadays, was gradually overpowered by bigger hitters, particularly the American Williams sisters, Venus and Serena.

Before that, Hingis set the pace with confidence. She became the youngest French Open junior champion, aged 12, and the youngest world No 1, aged 16 years, six months and one day.

Hingis won the Australian Open three years in a row from 1997, the year she also won Wimbledon and the United States Open. The French Open eluded her, though in 1999 she was three points from winning the title in the final against Steffi Graf, a match remembered less for the outcome than for Hingis' tantrums.

"Tennis gave me a magnificent life, and now a new life starts," she added. "I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me. I have no regrets at all. I am happy. How could I not be? I have money and I live in a country that I love. What more could I ask?"