"What does it take to be number one?", mused the marginally melodic rapper Nelly in 2001. While the question was posed rhetorically, it does warrant consideration. As anyone who as attained the supreme ranking in any endeavor will tell you, the answer is more than talent and hard work. When climbing a mountain, what you bring with you is necessary but not sufficient. The toughest part is choosing what you leave behind. "Of course, there is a lot of sacrifice behind that," attests former world #1 Vladimir Samsonov of Belarus. Samsonov is still ranked higher (world #27) than his age (44), a distinction he has held since 1996. Such sustained excellence is simply not possible without resisting a great deal of readily available comforts, be they social, familial, epicurean or otherwise hedonistic. Another Slavic-speaking star, Serbia's Borislava Perić-Ranković, can certainly attest to the personal cost of global dominance. The world's #1-ranked women's class 4 para table tennis player, the 47-year-old is also the defending Paralympic gold medalist. This necessarily limits the time she can spend with her family, including her 10-year-old daughter. "Due to my training camps and competitions, we didn’t see each other a lot," says Perić-Ranković, who was injured in a 1994 workplace accident. In 2002, at age 30, Perić-Ranković began training in table tennis with para player and coach Zlatko Kesler. Six years later, she won women's class 4 silver at the Beijing Paralympics, a feat she replicated four years later in London. In the Rio final, she overcame a 2-1 deficit against China's Zhang Miao to claim her first Paralympic gold. A passionate competitor, she was in full-on training mode for Tokyo 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic shut the world down. While she is eager to defend her title, Perić-Ranković is making the most of her compulsory hiatus. "I finally spend a lot of time with my daughter," she says. "I finally have enough time to spend with my family and to fulfill their wishes. We also play a lot of social games, we even invented some new ones in order to make time go faster." Not only a world-class athlete, Perić-Ranković is also a scholar, pursuing her master's degree in sports. While this will certainly help her in future job searches, if and when she retires from competition, she is currently employing her academic skills to coach her daughter to victory in online schooling. After all, mom clearly knows what it takes to be number one.
