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Martina Navratilova
b. 1956 Specialist
A Cold War defector who became tennis's most decorated champion
Martina Šubertová started hitting a tennis ball against a concrete wall in Prague at four, playing seriously by seven under the coaching of her stepfather, Miroslav Navrátil, whose surname she took. Her parents had divorced when she was three, and Czechoslovakia's Communist sports system, which controlled every part of an athlete's travel and income, took an interest not long after her talent became obvious. She won the national junior championship at 15 and turned professional at 18, but the state that had built her also confined her, and after a 1975 US Open semifinal loss to Chris Evert, she walked into an Immigration and Naturalization Service office in New York and asked to defect.
Navratilova and Evert defined women's tennis for the next decade, splitting more than 80 matches almost evenly, with Navratilova taking the head-to-head 43 to 37 and the bigger prize, 332 weeks at world number one over her career, second-most in tennis history. She holds the Open Era record for singles titles, 167, and doubles titles, 177, with 59 major titles in all: 18 in singles, including a record nine Wimbledon championships, 31 in women's doubles, and 10 in mixed. In 1983 she won 86 of 87 matches, a winning percentage no player has matched since. She became a US citizen in 1981, the same year she came out publicly, and reclaimed Czech citizenship in 2008 without giving up her American one.
Coming out cost Navratilova sponsorship money for years, at a level her records alone should have guaranteed her; corporations that lined up for Evert's endorsement stayed away from her through most of the 1980s. A decade-long relationship with Judy Nelson ended in a televised palimony lawsuit that aired her finances in open court. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010, treated with surgery and radiation, and diagnosed again in 2023 with both throat and breast cancer, declaring herself cancer-free that March. Her advocacy has not stayed uncomplicated: in 2019 she called transgender women 'failed male athletes' and lost her seat on the athlete-advocacy group Athlete Ally's advisory board, later softening the position without fully resolving it, a rare case of the activist siding with the sports establishment she had spent her career fighting.
Navratilova retired from full-time singles in 1994 and entered the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2000, by which point her rivalry with Evert had become the standard against which every later women's tennis rivalry gets measured. She married Julia Lemigova in 2014 after proposing at the US Open, and remains a visible commentator and AARP health ambassador. Serena Williams eventually passed her in major singles titles, but Navratilova's Open Era records for total singles and doubles titles still stand, unmatched by anyone who has played since.
Lifespan
Martina Navratilova's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.
Notable works
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Wimbledon singles championships
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Won a record nine times between 1978 and 1990 1990 -
1983 season
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86-1 record, a 98.9 percent winning percentage unmatched since 1983 -
Six consecutive Grand Slam singles titles
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Completed across 1983 and 1984 1984 -
Women's Sports Policy Working Group
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Co-founded to address transgender-athlete eligibility policy 2021
Life in brief
with age at each point- October 18, 1956 aged 0 Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia
- 1973 aged ~17 Makes her professional tour debut at 16
- September 1975 aged 18 Defects to the United States after the US Open
- 1981 aged ~25 Becomes a US citizen and comes out publicly
- 1983 aged ~27 Wins 86 of 87 matches, her best season
- November 1994 aged 38 Retires from full-time singles competition
- 2000 aged ~44 Inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame
- 2010 aged ~54 Diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer
- December 15, 2014 aged 58 Marries Julia Lemigova
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