GG Smirnova

Hanna Smirnova walks the finished bolts at a Minsk textile mill thread by thread for the flaws the machines miss, a job she describes as the last line of defence with no irony in it at all. She plays on alternate days. One on, one off, never two together, and the day off holds whether she has lost four in a row or is standing on the best run of her season, which several people have tested and none has moved. She decides quickly, doubles seldom and is almost never wrong about it, and she will sit through the longest match in the division without one word about the length of it.