Ana Ivanovic: Statuesque Serb who dodged Belgrade bombs says there will be no repeat of Paris meltdown

AP-Ana Ivanovic, whose website received 40 million visits last month, admits she unravelled in last year's French Open final

It is almost a year now since the statuesque Serb Ana Ivanovic took an early lead over Justine Henin in the Roland Garros final, only to fall apart in embarrassingly spectacular fashion. Twelve months on, with the shock waves of Henin's recent abandonment of her career still lapping at the portals of the women's game, the 20-year-old Ivanovic could take over Henin's place as the world No 1.

The summit would be Ana's if she repeats her achievement in getting to the final and the present No 1, Maria Sharapova, does not go further than the quarter-finals of the French Open, which gets under way today. Whatever the mathematics involved, it seems certain that one day soon the girl who learned her tennis in the days when bombs rained on her home city of Belgrade will win a Grand Slam, possibly two weeks from now or in six weeks' time at Wimbledon.

Ivanovic has learned a lot from that Henin hammering, enough to have finished as runner-up (to Sharapova) at the Australian Open in January, beaten but this time not disgraced. But the beautiful face is a mix of dismay and disbelief as she recalls that afternoon at Roland Garros, when she broke Henin, already a three-time winner of thetitle, in the opening game and then went 40-love up on herown serve.

As she tossed the ball for the point which would have given her a 2-0 lead, Ivanovic recalled: "In that single moment I startedto think, 'Oh my God, don't panic now', but the more I thought about it the more I panicked." That, she says, remains her worst moment on a tennis court. Beaten 6-1 6-2, Ivanovic insists she is now much better equipped to banish any inclination to such an attack of nerves.

All the confidence and higherstate of fitness she talks about will be needed if she is to repeat that final appearance. Though seeded second, her half of the Paris draw is infinitely more demanding than Sharapova's, containing both Venus and Serena Williams as well as her compatriot Jelena Jankovic.

With Jankovic and Novak Djokovic, whose Australian Open victory four months ago was the first Grand Slam for a Serb, Ivanovic has helped to spark an extraordinary upsurge in tennis in her homeland. "For so many kids in Serbia now, carrying a tennis racket has become a fashion statement. So many of them want to be like Novak, Jelena and me, and there aren't enough coaches to look after them. When I started playing it was the other way round, a lot of coaches and no kids."

Ana's interest in tennis was kindled at the age of five by watching her fellow Serb Monica Seles on television. She persuaded her parents, Miroslav and Dragana, to buy her a racket but then, and in the succeeding years, she was stymied by Serbia's woeful lack of facilities, plus what she acknowledges was her own timidity, something long banished.

There is the oft-related yarn of how she and Jankovic did their practising in an abandoned swimming pool converted into two makeshift tennis courts with serious limitations. For instance, cross-court shots and movement were impossible because the pool walls were only inches from the sides of the court. However, such difficulties were nothing compared to the misery and peril of life in Belgrade during Nato's aerial bombardment of the city during the 1999 Kosovo crisis.

The scars of those days may not be visible, but they exist. "Sometimes the bombs were so close to our home that the walls and windows shook, but we never hid in the cellar."

Travel for a promising junior was almost impossible. With Belgrade airport closed, the alternative was a seven-hour bus journey to Budapest, plus hours of queuing for visas. "Everyone seemed to think Serbs were bad people and I never felt welcome anywhere," said Ana.

The depressing struggle was transformed when a Swiss businessman with a passion for tennis, Dan Holzman, heard about this talented 14-year-old and eventually managed to get Ana and her mother to Switzerland, where he set her up with a laptop, mobile phone and an interest-free loan of £250,000. That largesse has long been repaid by someone whose career earnings by this weekend had comfortably exceeded £2m.

On her long journey away from a nightmare, Ivanovic collected a coach, Sven Groeneveld – yes, the very one who used to work with Greg Rusedski – and a strength and conditioning coach, Scott Byrnes. She was able to base herself in Basle and, as the victories were hauled in, the finest of facilities were opened up to her.

For example, last November a fondness for London took her to the LTA's state-of-the-art National Training Centre at Roehampton, where she trained for two weeks in preparation for the Australian Open, and did not fail to spot how many of the British children there, in bitter contrast to her own upbringing, took what she calls the "amazing" facilities so much for granted. So amazing that, to aid Ana's preparation for the Australian heat, one indoor court was heated to 35C.

"They were so kind and I will be going back there," she promised, perhaps to get ready for Wimbledon, where she was a semi-finalist in 2007.

A measure of the mushrooming interest in Ivanovic is the popularity of her website, which last month received 40 million visits, the most of any female athlete. Through the site she has received numerous proposals of marriage, and says she has had others, bellowed at full decibels, during matches.

Neither proposals nor any other deterrents, claims Ana, will be permitted to stand in the way of her joining Djokovic as a Grand Slam winner for Serbia. And she is hopeful that can happen before the summer is out.

Watch live French Open tennis from 10am today on British Eurosport