Japanese tennis star Naomi Osaka has become the world’s highest-paid female athlete, displacing US rival Serena Williams at the top of the list.

According to Forbes magazine, Osaka, 22, a two-time Grand Slam champion, made £30.7m in prize money and endorsements over the past 12 months.

That was £1.15m more than the amount earned by 38-year-old Williams.

Both shattered the previous single-year earnings record of £24.4m set in 2015 by Russia’s Maria Sharapova.

Since Forbes began tracking women athletes’ income in 1990, tennis players have topped the annual list every year.

Osaka, whose father was born in Haiti and whose mother is Japanese, is 29th on the 2020 Forbes list of the world’s 100 top-paid athletes, four spots ahead of Williams, the winner of 23 Grand Slam singles titles.

The complete Forbes list, due to be released next week, has not featured two women since 2016, the magazine says.

The pair met in the 2018 US Open final with Osaka winning her first Grand Slam title in a highly controversial match in which Williams was given three code violations by the umpire.

The Japanese then won the 2019 Australian Open, although her form has since dipped and she has fallen from world number one to 10th on the WTA rankings.

Williams had been the world’s highest-paid female athlete in each of the past four years, with Sharapova ruling for the five years before that.

Osaka has been a popular endorsement figure in Japan in the build-up to the now-postponed Tokyo Olympics, securing lucrative deals with global brands Nike, Nissan and Yonex, among others.

Naomi was born on October 16, 1997, in Chūō-ku, Osaka in Japan to Tamaki Osaka and Leonard François.[1] Her mother is from Hokkaido, Japan, and her father is from Jacmel, Haiti. She has an older sister named Mari who is also a professional tennis player. The two girls were given their mother’s maiden name because of the Japanese Family Registration Law (Koseki), when the family lived in Japan (the foreign husband must join the Japanese spouse’s koseki and children are registered under the Japanese spouse’s surname). Osaka’s parents met when her father was visiting Hokkaido while he was a college student in New York.[2][3]

When Osaka was three years old, her family moved from Japan to Valley Stream, New York on Long Island to live with her father’s parents. Osaka’s father was inspired to teach his daughters how to play tennis, by watching the Williams sisters compete at the 1999 French Open. Having little experience as a tennis player himself, he sought to emulate how Richard Williams trained his daughters to become two of the best players in the world, despite having never played the sport. François remarked that, “The blueprint was already there. I just had to follow it”, with regard to the detailed plan Richard had developed for his daughters. He began coaching Naomi and Mari once they settled in the United States.[2] In 2006, Osaka’s family moved to Florida when Naomi was eight or nine years old so that they would have better opportunities to train. Naomi practiced on the Pembroke Pines public courts.[2] When she was 15 years old, she began working with Patrick Tauma at the ISP Academy.[4] In 2014, she moved to the Harold Solomon Tennis Academy.[5] She later trained at the ProWorld Tennis Academy.[6]

Although Osaka was raised in the United States, her parents decided that their daughters would represent Japan. They said, “We made the decision that Naomi would represent Japan at an early age. She was born in Osaka and was brought up in a household of Japanese and Haitian culture. Quite simply, Naomi and her sister Mari have always felt Japanese so that was our only rationale. It was never a financially motivated decision nor were we ever swayed either way by any national federation.”[6] This decision may have also been motivated by a lack of interest from the United States Tennis Association (USTA) when Naomi was still a young player.[2] The USTA later offered Naomi the opportunity to train at their national training center in Boca Raton when she was 16 years old, but she declined