Venise Chan: From Tennis Prodigy to Padel Pioneer at Asian Games

At 12, Venise Chan Wing-yau was being hailed as the “future Venus Williams of Hong Kong tennis”, a precocious finalist at the national championships and the next big thing in a sport that devours its young. She smiles now at that old label, and at the thought of how different her life might have been had she grown up in the era of viral clips and instant judgment.

She didn’t have to live online. She only had to live on court.

A quarter of a century later, Chan is still out there, still learning fast, still chasing the buzz of a new challenge. The sport has changed. The instinct hasn’t.

This month, she will walk into the Asian Games not with a tennis racquet, but with a padel bat in her hand, representing Hong Kong in a discipline making its debut at the continental showpiece. Padel is billed as the world’s fastest-growing racquet sport; Chan has treated it like a sprint.

The Games appearance will be a return of sorts. Twelve years have passed since she last played there as a tennis player, the final chapter of a three-Games run that defined her early sporting life. When that door closed, she didn’t drift away from competition. She simply found a different court.

In the years between, Chan carved out a new niche in pickleball, another hybrid racquet sport that rewards feel, anticipation and sharp hands. She rose quickly enough to help the Hong Kong city team reach the World Cup final in the United States last year, proof that her competitive edge had survived the switch from the baseline to the kitchen line.

Padel arrived almost by accident. A colleague at Carret Private Capital, where Chan works as a risk and compliance director, invited her to try it. Another social hit, another casual game, or so it seemed.

It didn’t stay casual for long.

The glass walls, the tight angles, the doubles tactics – they all clicked. The same quick study who tore through junior tennis drew a new blueprint in her head. By January, the thought had already taken shape: “Maybe I could try for the Asian Games.”

That was the turning point. Once she framed padel as more than a hobby, the old habits returned. Training blocks. Technical tweaks. Competitive targets. The quiet, relentless repetition that once drove her through tennis qualifiers now pushed her into a new national squad.

“Once I started playing, I didn’t stop,” she said.

The line sums up more than her padel journey. It tracks a career that has refused to settle, hopping codes but never losing its competitive core. From the weight of being compared to Venus Williams as a child to the relative anonymity of emerging sports, Chan has moved from the spotlight to the fringes and back again.

Now, as padel steps onto the Asian Games stage for the first time, Hong Kong will send out a player who has already lived several sporting lives. The sport is new. The pressure won’t be. And for Venise Chan, that might be the biggest advantage of all.