For the past two years, she has been speaking publicly about her story of how she fell in love with a coach 33 years her senior when she was young and it left its mark on her. American tennis legend Pam Shriver wants to warn current players against relationships with their coaches. But her theory was somewhat shattered by Petra Kvitová’s wedding to Jiří Vaňek.
When the 33-year-old Czech tennis player married her coach Jiří Vaňek at the Oblík estate in July, she received a storm of congratulations from current and former tennis players. But for one former legend especially of the doubles scene, the American Pam Shriver, it somewhat undermined her fight against the relationships between players and coaches.
She has had a bad experience herself. When she was 17 years old, she reportedly fell in love with her then 50-year-old coach, Don Candy.
“I remember telling him that I fell in love with him. Things could have gone in a different direction if he had been aware and sensed the complications it would bring. But he didn’t want to give up on me, I was a talent,” she wrote a year ago in her column for the Australian newspaper The Age.
Candy then had an affair with her for a long time, even though he was married. And this is said to have affected Shriver in such a way that she is now trying to push for the WTA organization to set rules according to which the relationship in the tennis “workplace” would be prohibited.
Even Vaněk is older than Kvitová, a total of 12 years. Their marriage also reached Shriver, who reacted immediately.
“They’re an example of why I’m not asking for a blanket ban on these relationships. They’re in a consensual relationship, she’s in her 30s and they’ve known each other for a long time, you can’t disagree with that,” Shriver said on The Craig Shapiro Tennis Podcast.
According to her, in world tennis, little attention is paid to educational prevention for female players who play tennis and at the same time their hormones are raging during puberty. Among the teenage girls, a situation like the one that happened to the winner of 112 WTA doubles tournaments can happen.
“It’s a question of ethics, morality. It is necessary to work with coaches who work with youth. Somehow we have reached a stage where the tennis public accepts that female tennis players sleep with coaches, but we have to switch our heads to the mode ‘no, this should not happen’ ’,” Shriver said.
Kvitova is not the only player married to her coach. Among the top players in the world, her husband is a coach, for example, Veronika Kuděrmetová of Russia, for more than five years.
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2023-08-05 05:17:06
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