Donna Vekic Won Croatia's First Female Olympic Tennis Medal

The medal Croatia had never had

Start with Paris. Vekic arrived at the 2024 Summer Olympics in rough shape. She later described arm pain, ankle pain, and a cough so bad she couldn't hit two shots in a row, on top of a canceled flight on the way in, according to comments she gave to Flashscore after the tournament. She played anyway, and she kept winning: past Lucia Bronzetti, past 2019 US Open champion Bianca Andreescu, past second seed Coco Gauff in the third round, and past 12th seed Marta Kostyuk in a quarterfinal she survived on her fifth match point. A semifinal win over Anna Karolina Schmiedlova put her in the gold-medal match against China's Zheng Qinwen, who beat her 6-2, 6-3. Silver was still a first: Vekic became the first Croatian woman to win an Olympic tennis medal.

It was not Croatia's first tennis medal overall. Goran Ivanisevic took bronze in singles at the 1992 Barcelona Games, the country's first Olympics, and Marin Cilic won doubles silver alongside Ivan Dodig in Tokyo. But no Croatian woman had ever stood on an Olympic tennis podium before Vekic did in Paris.

A Wimbledon semifinal longer than any before it

A month before the Olympics, Vekic had already produced the best Grand Slam run of her career. She reached her first major semifinal at the 2024 Wimbledon Championships and pushed Jasmine Paolini through a 2-6, 6-4, 7-6(8) match that ran two hours and 51 minutes, the longest women's singles semifinal in the tournament's history, edging past the previous record set by Serena Williams and Elena Dementieva back in 2009. Paolini went on to lose the final to Barbora Krejcikova, but she still became the first Italian woman to reach a Wimbledon singles final in the Open Era, with Vekic as the opponent who nearly stopped her getting there.

The trophy she almost didn't get to play for

Then came June 2026, and the strangest chapter yet. Vekic lost in the final round of qualifying at the HSBC Championships at Queen's Club in London, the WTA's grass-court tune-up before Wimbledon, beaten by Anna Blinkova. Under normal circumstances that ends the week. But when Marta Kostyuk withdrew from the main draw, Vekic was next in line as a lucky loser, the ranking-based system tennis uses to fill a suddenly open spot. Ranked outside the top 70 at the time, she won five matches in a row on her favorite surface and beat home favorite Emma Raducanu in the final, 6-0, 7-6(6), needing three match points in that second-set tiebreak before finally converting a fourth. It was her first WTA 500-level title, and only the seventh time in the Open Era that any lucky loser has won a WTA title at all.

That jealousy had a specific cause. Queen's Club hosted a women's professional event for the first time in 52 years when the WTA tournament returned there in 2025, having last crowned a women's singles champion in 1973. Vekic's 2026 win was only the second time the modern women's event had changed hands, and the first time it went to a player who had not even qualified for the draw on her own. Afterward, she credited the same coach for the whole run, one she has kept since childhood.

Candles, bees, and a tennis court back in Osijek

Off the court, Vekic runs DNNA, a beeswax candle and home-fragrance line she launched in 2021 on her 25th birthday. The wax comes from Kopacki Rit Nature Park near her hometown of Osijek, and part of the proceeds from each candle supports the park's bee population, according to Croatia Week and a WTA feature on the business. The line has since picked up design honors, including a Red Dot Award. Vekic has also funded three public tennis courts in Osijek, built to resemble the courts at major tournaments, so kids in her hometown can practice somewhere that looks like the real thing. I did not find confirmation of DNNA's current retail status in 2026, only well-documented coverage of its 2021 launch and mission, so I'm treating the brand's ongoing footprint as unconfirmed rather than guessing at it.

Where her ranking stands now

Her ranking has swung hard this year. Vekic hit a career-high No. 17 in January 2025, slid afterward, then climbed back toward No. 32 once the Queen's Club run landed. As of mid-September 2026 the WTA had her at No. 37, and Tuesday's straight-set loss in Singapore will not help that number. We think that volatility is the real story behind the search interest this week, more than any single scoreline: a career that keeps refusing to move in one direction, from a lost qualifying match to a Grand Slam semifinal to an Olympic final and back again.

None of this makes Tuesday's result less real. Wang played the better tennis, and Vekic has a first-round exit to carry into her next event. But one scoreline shrinks a season that already includes a Croatian first, a Wimbledon record, and a trophy nobody expected her to lift.