Anna Kournikova
Biography of Anna Kournikova
Anna Sergeyevna Kournikova was born on June 7, 1981 in Moscow. She is a former Russian tennis player.
Anna Kournikova started playing tennis at the age of five in a weekly children's sports program. Her first coach was Larissa Preobrazhenskaya. In February 1992, she entered Nick Bollettieri's tennis academy in Bradenton, Florida. At the end of the 1990s, Pavel Složil and Eric van Harpen also took care of their training before mother Alla took over this task from 2000 onwards. Harold Solomon was her coach from the tournament in Rome in May 2002 until her retirement in June 2003.
Kournikova made her professional debut at the age of 14 in September 1995. In the same year she became Orange Bowl winner and number 1 among juniors, at the end of the season she was ranked 281 in the WTA world rankings. Making her Fed Cup debut for Russia in 1996, she became the youngest-ever player in the competition. By the end of the season, she improved her ranking to position 57. She competed for Russia in doubles at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.
In 1997 Kournikova played Wimbledon for the first time and reached the semi-finals right away, which brought her 32nd place in the WTA rankings. The following year she won her first tournament alongside Monica Seles in Tokyo. 1999 followed by more doubles titles with Martina Hingis at the Australian Open, in Indian Wells, Rome, Eastbourne and the Masters and the mixed final with Jonas Björkman in Wimbledon; also the singles final in Hilton Head, in which she lost 2:6 and 3:6 to Martina Hingis. At the end of 2000 Kournikova reached after further double titles with 8th place and her best placing in the individual world rankings.
In the following years, Kournikova won four more doubles titles, one with Barbara Schett in Sydney (2001), two with Martina Hingis (2001 in Moscow and 2002 at the Australian Open, the last of eleven together) and one with Janet Lee in Shanghai.
At the age of 21, Kournikova largely retired from professional tennis due to severe back and spine problems. At the end of the 2003 season, she was only 305th in the rankings after only five tournament starts - the last in April in Charleston. In the summer of 2004 she played a few more exhibitions, then graced the cover of Maxim magazine again, advertised Omega watches and produced a new calendar. In the meantime, she was no longer listed in the world rankings.
In 1998, 1999 and 2000 Kournikova qualified in singles and doubles for the Masters, which later became the WTA Tour Championships. She won the doubles competition there in 1999 and 2000 and also reached the semifinals in singles in 2000. In the Fed Cup she made twelve appearances in three years with twelve wins (ten in doubles) and seven defeats (five in singles).
Kournikova - who has been in the top 20 of the WTA world rankings for a long time and has reached semifinals and finals several times - has not won a single title in her professional career.
Kournikova is also present in the media after her career end and has several advertising contracts. She enjoys a high level of recognition even among people who are not interested in women's tennis. Her relationships were extensively reported in the tabloid press, and photos of her in scanty clothing also appeared in various erotic magazines. Already during her career she was present in model magazines.
In addition to her sporting achievements, Kournikova owes her great fame to her looks; she has often been referred to as a more recent sex symbol. For a time, her name was one of the most frequently entered search terms in Internet search engines.
Kournikova's father Sergei is a professor and used to be a wrestler, her mother Alla is an economist. Kazakh tennis player Yevgeny Korolev is her cousin.
Kournikova dated ice hockey player Sergei Fyodorov for some time. According to him, the two married in Moscow in 2001, but are said to have divorced shortly afterwards. Since the end of 2001 she has been in a relationship with the Spanish singer Enrique Iglesias, whom she met while filming his music video Escape. In 2017 she gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. Their third child was born on January 30, 2020.
In 2010 it was reported that Kournikova had acquired US citizenship.
Anna Kournikova Wallpapers
