Unlike many of her contemporaries, Serena Williams goes beyond the weight of her incredible numbers. By itself, the statistics are mind-boggling: 22 Grand Slam singles titles, 38 total Grand Slam titles, four Olympic gold medals, the highest paid female athlete in the world and the list has just started.

But Williams is so much more. She is a fighter who has reached the top only after overcoming the sort of adversities which many others in tennis have never faced. As a black American female athlete in her sport, Williams has faced racism, she has been body-shamed and has even had a brush with violence, with her half-sister Yetunde Price succumbing to gunshot wounds she sustained while being caught in a crossfire between two gangs in 2003 in Compton in California.

And so there could have been no better candidate than Williams to do this:

This is Williams, a defiant, triumphant champion, staring at the camera as she utters the immortal words from Maya Angelou's classic Still I Rise, a poem which has become the embodiment of the struggles black Americans faced in their movement to garner civil rights in the last century.

"Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes," taunts Williams, as the video cuts to moments of frustration during difficult times in her decade-long career. And then it moves on, to her many moments of glory, both earlier and present, as the determined 22 Grand Slam winner stares at the camera and utters those famous lines: "I am the dream and hope of the slave...I rise..."