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For as Wimbledon prepares for another two weeks of foreign bodies and home truths, Hingis's admirers are still experiencing unfamiliar double vision after their 18-year-old heroine's spectacular dummy-spitting display in this month's French Open final against Steffi Graf. It took her mother to coax Hingis back on court for the post-match formalities, which most teenagers would rate as the ultimate shame. Given the choice between obeying Mum and streaking down the Champs Elysées, nine out of 10 British students would regard removing their underwear as pretty well compulsory.

To those outside the immediate tramlines of the sport, it was not so much what Hingis said or did - although walking around the net and climbing the umpire's chair rank alongside peeing in the club secretary's drive on tennis's etiquette scale - it was more the shock discovery of a darker side to the sweet-natured Swiss, a bitter secret lurking within the wholesome, creamy-white Toblerone image her public had bought into.

Short of learning that Wimbledon's chief executive Christopher Gorringe had his nipples pierced last winter, it is hard to imagine anything less to the taste of the All England Club's starchier inmates. All sorts of ghastly Americans clog up their lawns but even brash visitors such as Jimmy Connors and Andre Agassi have generally had a deep-rooted respect for the game. At Roland Garros, Hingis chose the worst possible time to mislay her return ticket.

Telegenic smile
Heading down to Eastbourne's Grand Hotel last week to gather fresh evidence was a bit like tiptoeing past a "Beware Fierce Dog" sign to be greeted by a wagging tail. Dressed in dainty lilac, Hingis looked and sounded about as dangerous as Bo Peep in a town where rebellious youth covers anyone under 65 who does not play bowls. "I don't really look aggressive, do I?" she murmured, daring her interrogators to disagree. The dazzling telegenic smile did the rest: of course she would behave herself at Wimbledon. "England is different," she explained, as if that said everything.

What makes her sudden explosion and its aftermath particularly fascinating, though, is the whole relationship between women's tennis and its leading ladies, seemingly forever doomed to be as mentally fragile as they are rich and successful.

Hingis, so natural, so gifted, apparently good-humoured, seemed the exception to it all. Winner of three grand slam singles titles before her 17th birthday, and five in all, she has already clocked up 100 weeks as the world's No1. The reason she blew up in Paris, she suggested, was simply because defeat wrecked her chance of achieving the elusive grand slam she had set her heart on this year. She even had her victory dress ready.

"It was the first thing I thought about when I came back to the locker room. I was sobbing to my mum, 'I could have won the grand slam.' When you're 18, waiting another year seems like forever. I was raised this way. Not liking to lose."

It almost sounds plausible, but then the world is full of bad losers. Champions are driven by something extra. Did she, in retrospect, regret her behaviour? Long pause. "Jesus, I just get on with life. Regretting things doesn't make any sense. I'm not the first person this sort of thing has happened to. I'm still young and I hope I can learn from this. I will do, otherwise I'm not going to get anywhere."

In other words, she will be better prepared next time. It fits with the testimony supplied by one regular courtside observer. "She's a smart cookie. She knows it's difficult enough to beat one opponent let alone 15,000 others in the crowd." Whereas Graf, in a provocative gesture she may regret this Wimbledon, placed an advert in L'Equipe thanking French fans for their support, Hingis wants her adversaries to know she is already concentrating on the future.

Disappearing back to the Czech Republic for a few days of horse riding helped. "It was the best recovery I could have had. Just forest, woods, total nature. I didn't read any newspapers." Several hundred acres of forest elsewhere were flattened in condemnation nevertheless, and it might have done her good to read some of the criticism.

Intentionally or not, her Achilles' heel remains the way she puts down her rivals, as her former doubles partner Jana Novotna and powerful French hope Amelie Mauresmo have discovered. Novotna was supposedly informed she was "too old and too slow", although Hingis denies saying it, and Mauresmo was dismissed as "half a man", a throwaway line which has rumbled on since the Australian Open.

Either because of this, or her ranking, she does not have a surfeit of friends in the locker room. Anna Kournikova and Nathalie Tauziat both commiserated with her in Paris, but the likes of Graf and Monica Seles have not gone out of their way to become bosom buddies with the player who has usurped them both as No1. Of more concern to Hingis seems to be the ambivalence of crowds who, she insists, do not fully appreciate her.

Lack of attention
"My type of game is maybe not too easy to understand," she suggests. "I'm so little yet I beat big girls. Maybe it just looks too easy when I'm playing well." After she became Wimbledon's youngest champion this century two years ago, the Kosice-born Hingis even bemoaned the relative lack of attention she received in Switzerland, her home since arriving with her mother when she was eight. Were she a world-class skier, of course, they would love her to death.

Her ever-present mother and coach Melanie Molitor is generally considered to have counselled her daughter well thus far, encouraging her to build a semblance of a life outside tennis. Advice from outside the inner sanctum, though, has to date been rationed. "There are not too many people telling you the truth if you're one of the best players in the world," Hingis explained plaintively last week.

Suggestions that she might not hang around the pro game past her mid-20s have been quietly dropped. "I'll play for as long as I really like it and as long as I can stay at the top level. Once you've been a winner you definitely don't like losing. It doesn't make sense spending too long out there getting beaten by everybody, especially when they're younger."

But if the Wimbledon draw has been kind this time, no one quite knows about the SW19 crowd. Paris has taught her once again that familiar faces, not necessarily new champions, generate most affection; Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova could have enlightened her long ago. To hear Hingis acknowledge the fact - "I'll just have to wait until my time comes" - is perhaps the clearest indication that Paris may yet prove a blessing.

Sadly, if there is one tournament on the planet where it pays to arrive with squeaky-clean linen it is Wimbledon; even now the press-room "rotters" will be underlining her name in stubby pencil, ever sensitive to young celebrities with a bit of "previous" and, with luck, some off-court love interest.

It makes for a desperately unforgiving arena, whatever your seeding. Hingis needs to smile into every lens, shelve those sneaky underarm serves and pray that Tim Henman survives well into the second week.

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