Martina Navratilovanine-time Wimbledon champion, confesses in an interview with Laureus Spirit of Sport.
Q: Let’s talk about some of the players competing at Wimbledon this year, starting with Coco Gauff, the reigning US Open champion and a candidate for the 2024 Laureus World Newcomer of the Year Award.
Answer. The pressure has been on Coco. She’s been a prodigy since she was 12, she was expected to be a champion. They saw that she had the physical ability, the mental ability and, most of all, the will to go out there every day and work hard when no one was watching. I think for a while she felt like she wasn’t up to the task, but now that she’s won the US Open, the pressure is off and she can continue to grow. So it was great to see her handle it, especially at the US Open. It can be a blessing or a curse when the crowd is with you. If you double fault, 20,000 people are screaming ‘Whoops!’ But at the same time, when you hit a good shot or win the point, they go crazy. She lived off that energy and she grew throughout the tournament. She’s slowed down, because I think the first two years she was very excited. When I was on tour, I was like, ‘This girl is going to burn out,’ because you can’t have that intensity on every point. Now you know when the important points come, when to relax a bit, and when to plug back in.
She has a great serve. She sometimes misses the second serve, but she still has a lot of power. She hits the ball at 125 miles per hour, which is a good problem. Her Achilles heel is her forehand. The grip is so extreme that it limits a lot of what you can do with the ball, but she will adapt to it and figure out how to win with it. And even though players look at that forehand, they are not able to exploit it. The only way to open the court is to move people, and Coco covers the court probably better than anyone. I think she is faster than anyone, so she makes up for her forehand not being as good. It is good enough, and her backhand is stellar. She has drop shots. She moves both forward and side to side. She can beat you with her power or with her defense, and not many people do that.
Q. What about the current SW19 (Wimbledon) champion, Marketa Vondrousová?
R. When she won Wimbledon, I had mixed feelings. It would have been better for women’s tennis if Ons Jabeur had won that match. She had a lot of pressure on her: for the Arab world and for women, especially in the Arab world and in Africa. She would have been the first player – male or female – from that continent to win. And that pressure got to her.
On the other hand, Markéta, I think I was planning to go home after the first round! We Czechs have a game that adapts to any surface. They have taught us very well. We grow on clay, but you can play on grass. As he progressed, he realized that he could play on this surface. And in the final she didn’t get nervous. As a Czech, she supported her, but globally, she supported Ons.
Markéta arrived as a great talent. We thought he was going to do great things, but that wasn’t the case. He was in the top 20, but nothing more. He then went back and forth with injuries, and then he came back and placed in the top 10, and he has lived up to those expectations, he has met them quite well.
Q. And what about world number 1, French Open champion and Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year nominee Iga Witek?
R. Iga is number one for several reasons and is the most consistent player there is. Rybakina has a great serve, she can take you off the court, and Sabalenka has the best game: when she is in shape, she is very difficult to beat. But Iga is closer to her best level. She has a safer game. She has a flat backhand, her forehand is very open, she takes people off the court, and she covers the court beautifully, she understands the geometry of the court. What if she adds the drop shot to her game? Careful.
She still has a lot to improve in her transition, but she’s already number one and has dominated the last two years. So Iga has a lot of potential. She’s a student of the game and she’s certainly hungry for titles, and she’s still only 22. Even if she doesn’t change anything, she’ll win many more Grand Slams. But if she improves, watch out.
Q. It’s been 40 years since one of the most extraordinary achievements in tennis, your 74-match winning streak, which remains a record. What are your memories of that streak?
R. Looking back, those two years were the best of my career. You don’t know when it’s happening, but it was. I was on a 55-match winning streak when I lost to Hana Mandlíková in the final of the first tournament in 1984. I still remember that match, in San Francisco. And I was two wins away from breaking Chris Evert’s record. And I said, ‘OK, I’ll have to start another streak.’ And then I didn’t lose until the last tournament of the year. So I lost the first tournament of the year and then the Australian Open semifinal, to Helena Suková. That was the 74-match streak. Also, at the same time, Pam Shriver and I were on a winning streak in doubles. [como equipo ganaron el Calendar Slam en 1984]So I lost like three matches in two years, both in singles and doubles.
It was crazy. You almost forget what it’s like to lose when that happens. I was so confident because I knew I didn’t have to play my best and I could beat anyone. I just had to play… normal. You know you’ve got all the bases covered. I had a better serve than anybody, a better forehand than anybody. A better slice than anybody. At the net? Hello?
It was a fun trip, but at the same time there was a lot of pressure because that’s all they want to talk about: the streak. And in the end the pressure got to me, when I lost to Helena Suková, because I was going to win seven majors in a row. I had won the last six. So I’m tied with Margaret Court. And it probably won’t happen again. Not the streak of 74 matches or those six majors in a row.
The countryside is better. The average player is more capable of beating the best players than she was 20 or 30 years ago. It’s not that she had easy matches, but she knew she was going to win no matter what. Somehow, against most players, even on a bad day, she still came through those matches. For today’s players, on a bad day, you lose, because the other players are better. So these streaks are more difficult to chain, without a doubt, because the level is higher. The goal of the streak was to beat Chris’s record. When you’re that close you want to do it. When you get past 30 or 40 games and Chris’s streak was 56, you start to think about it.
Many things have to go right. On your bad days, you have to play against inferior players. You can’t get sick, you can’t get injured. The stars have to align. And the press, it doesn’t help to talk about it after every game. Like, ‘Oh my God, ask me something else.’
Q. What would you do differently today in the same situation?
R. There are two things I would do differently if I could do it over again. I would have gotten a coach when I first defected in 1975. I was six years without a coach, playing on my own. And the other thing is I would play less. But we weren’t so focused on the majors. Chris and I didn’t even play the Australian Open and the French Open a lot of times because they weren’t that big. The third biggest tournament of the year was the WTA finals, our Masters, at the end of the year. Those were the three tournaments you really wanted to win.
On the circuit, outside of the Slams, I tried with the same intensity. I worked just as hard in all the other tournaments. As female athletes, we had to make sure our tour was a success. Because if the men’s sponsor leaves, they find 20 more. For women, if we fail, that can be the end of everything. So we felt responsible for supporting the tour and making sure the sponsors were happy, which meant playing maybe more than we wanted to.
And I would play less doubles. He played all the tournaments, doubles and singles. At the age Novak is now, I probably played about 600 more singles matches and probably 800 more doubles matches. So now I would take some time in the middle of the year to recover. The most I took was three weeks during the year. And most of the time it was a week or two and then you went back to playing. Most years I played between 18 and 20 tournaments a year. Plus the majors, there are 25, half the year you are on tour. Nowadays, female players are much smarter. So it was different. You finished on Sunday, traveled on Monday and played the game on Tuesday, in a new place. There were 32 players in the draw, so you played five singles, four doubles. So if I was on the road for three tournaments, I soaked 27 shirts. Because he was going to play 27 games. And I didn’t have time to do laundry on the way!
2024-06-28 14:07:16
#forget #lose
