The U.S. Open this month was marked more by high fashion and bad calls than top players battling it out under gloomy skies, as top-seeded women were knocked out of the finals by young upstarts.

But in the wake of the tournament last week, a landmark event occurred: out lesbian tennis player Amelie Mauresmo became the number one female tennis player in the world when Lindsay Davenport was sent home by Svetlana Kuznetsova--even though Mauresmo has yet to win a single Grand Slam tournament.

This is especially remarkable when you consider that Mauresmo is one of the only openly gay players in women's tennis. She is also the first French woman ever to claim the number-one title.

According to the Women’s Tennis Association, Mauresmo was born on July 5, 1979 in St. Germains en Laye, France. She was inspired to play tennis at age four after watching Yannick Noah play Roland Garros on television. Mauresmo mentally prepares for matches through yoga and zen practice. She has a golden retriever named Sophia and likes to listen to Dido. Mauresmo's breakthrough year was in 1998, when she finished the season ranked at number 29.

Mauresmo, a French citizen, has been public about her sexual orientation since she nonchalantly came out to a French newspaper in 1999 and told reporters she was in love (with then-girlfriend Sylvie Bourdon, a nightclub owner) and that her relationship with Bourdon improved her tennis.

Mauresmo was unprepared for the media attention she received around this disclosure of her sexual orientation, or the flurry of homophobic comments made by fellow women’s tennis stars. Among the most inflammatory was Martina Hingis’s statement that Mauresmo was “half a man.” The remarks were just as quickly retracted, but players continued to comment on Mauresmo’s aggressive game on the court and muscular physique, which challenged their more conventional notions of how women present themselves and play tennis. Regularly Mauresmo was said to play like a guy.

At the same time, the Williams sisters were tearing up the courts with a style very similar to Mauresmo, but they were not being compared to men (although they did face an equal amount of derision for not being feminine enough).

Nike (her corporate sponsor) and the French Tennis Federation were okay with her decision to come out publicly, according to Mauresmo, but the Women's Tennis Association expressed a preference that she keep quiet about it.

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