Martina Hingis was born on 30 September 1980 in Košice, Czechoslovakia. Her mother, Melanie Molitor, a former top player in Czechoslovakia, named her after Martina Navratilova and became her coach; her father, Karol Hingis, was also a tennis coach. When she was seven she moved to Switzerland after her mother married a Swiss man.
She broke age records at every step. At 12 she won the 1993 French Open junior title, the youngest junior major champion ever, and she turned professional at 13. In 1996, aged 15 years and nine months, she won the Wimbledon doubles with Helena Suková to become the youngest major champion in history. In January 1997, at 16 years and three months, she won the Australian Open, the youngest major singles champion of the 20th century. She went on to win Wimbledon and the US Open that year and became world No. 1 at 16, still the youngest ever. She added Australian Open titles in 1998 and 1999 and reached 12 major singles finals between 1997 and 2002, six of them in a row in Melbourne; the French Open, where she was twice a finalist, was the one major singles title she never won.
Injuries led her to retire in early 2003, at 22. She came back in 2006, won two titles, returned to the top 10 and took the Australian Open mixed doubles. In 2007 she retired again, after announcing she had tested positive for cocaine at that year's Wimbledon. She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2013 and then returned once more, this time in doubles. From 2015 to 2017 she won ten more major titles, with partners including Sania Mirza, Leander Paes, Jamie Murray and Chan Yung-jan, and she retired for good in 2017, weeks after winning both the doubles and the mixed at the US Open.
She finished with 25 major titles, five in singles, 13 in women's doubles and seven in mixed, along with 43 singles titles, 64 doubles titles and 89 weeks at No. 1 in doubles.