Jelena ‘Serbs’ a counterpunch

Jelena Jankovic might be serving up some powerful aces on the field, but when she rushed into her hotel room in Hyderabad recently, she only managed to say, “I really want to go shopping! I only managed to buy a pair of earrings, I wish I had more time in Hyderabad.” And it’s then that you realise — Jelena might be the fierce fighter on court — but off-field, she’s “just another person with a shopping inclination”.

As she prepared herself for a match against Martina Hingis (who heads Hyderabad Aces in the CTL), a match she and her team Nagpur Oranges eventually went on to win, Jelena seemed cool. She says with a laugh, “All this that you see... is a facade. I get nervous even now... the nervousness appears before every match, but it’s okay.”

For someone who has seen all the highs in Tennis — she was World No. 1, World No. 3 and World No. 8 at one point of time — Jelena has handled the lows pretty well. But there was one point in her career that she didn’t think she would recover from. “Ever since I started playing professionally at the age of 15, I was only winning matches. Up until I turned 18, I had not seen one loss. But at 18, there was a time when I lost nine matches consequently. You know what that did to me It broke me,” she says, adding, “I couldn’t handle the losses. I just wanted to give up. I had even told myself that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a tennis player... I decided to study and then perhaps take up a normal job,” she explains. But, when Jelena had given up, it was her mother who brought her back to her first love. “I owe this to my mum. I wouldn’t be here playing all these matches if it wasn’t for her. She never let me give up. And so I held on. After that downfall, I went on to win the other matches and I never looked back,” she adds

Today, Jelena is ranked 21 on WTA’s single’s ranking and the start to her remarkable career happened only because she “wanted to copy her brother”. “When I was small, I never played with dolls. I would always be the little girl who would run and play with her brothers. And since my brother was a few years older than us (me and my younger brother), we would always imitate him. So when he started playing tennis, we naturally wanted to copy him and we followed him to his practise,” she says.

During one of these sessions, when Jelena was playing, her brother’s coach noticed that she “had talent”. “He told my parents that I could make it big in tennis and that I had talent... so that’s basically how it all started,” she says.

Over the past few years, Jelena has battled a lot of injuries and has had some phenomenal wins and a few losses as well. “The past few years have taught me a lot. I had to learn to be patient with my body, learn to give it some time to recover from my injuries and that was tough. The start of this year, too, was quite tricky, I tore a muscle, hurt my back and then went on to hurt my foot. In total, I spent at least five months off the field,” she says.

But that didn’t deter her, “Athletes need to learn to love their body and give it time to recover. We can’t afford to run back to play because if we don’t recover, we’ll only end up hurting ourselves even more. All this made me realise that I need to pay attention to my body. I can’t rush my body into playing,” she says.

Currently, Jelena has her eyes set firmly on her goal. She says, “I want to get back as one of the top seeds in tennis. I’m practising harder, working out much more and concentrating on getting my body in shape. The past few wins, even if they were small titles have been a great boost to my career and I know that things will only get better from here.”