Tathiana Garbin began playing tennis at the amazing young age of 3 and now 23 years later she will play Jelena Dokic for the first time in her career, at the opening round of Bali.

Tathiana is listed on postition no 110 in the WTA-rankings. She is a strong server and even plays her backhand one-handed. Actually her games stats look pretty similar to Jelenas. She has about the same serve speeds, even on second serve which she serves with more than 80 mph, too! Also numerous double faults and unforced errors reminded me on Jelenas stats, but I doubt the quality of her winners are the same as of the yougoslavian. She also doesnt stick to the baseline and she usually hits more winners as her opponent. 

Her biggest success was winning the tournament of Budapest in 2000 where she also claimed her career high ranking of 38!

The 26 year old player from Mestre in Italy prefers to play on all kind of slow-courts, though her results this year are pretty poor on slow surfaces.

2003 started quite well for the Italian #7. She reached the quarters of Gold Coast, beating Tanasugarn there, the second round of Auckland and only lost at the second round of the Australian Open because of an injury.

After a two months break she first lost her opening match at Key Biscane, but only a fortnight later she won three matches in a row at Charleston (2
of them were qualifying matches). Also at Amelia Island she reached the second round, at Bol even the quarters and at Berlin she could at least qualify.

But then she completely lost her form, and beside winning one match at Roland Garros, she only had purely disappoing results until she decided to
play a challenger tournament at Italy about a month ago and won the title!

With that boost of confidence she went to play the US-Open and reached the second round, which earned her enough points to be listed in the Top100 again, and finally she went to Bali, where she will play against Jelena Dokic at Tuesday morning (european time) or monday night (american time).