Ten years after walking away from the professional tennis circuit, Ana Ivanović leads a life that appears as serene as the Mediterranean landscape of Palma de Mallorca where she now resides. A successful businesswoman and mother of three boys, she spends her days focused on her family and her ventures in the IT and cosmetics industries. Yet, the story of how a young girl from Belgrade reached the pinnacle of the sporting world is not just a tale of athletic triumph but a profound lesson in sacrifice and the courage to choose peace over prestige.
Ivanović’s journey began with a moment of precocious clarity at just five years old when she memorized a phone number for a tennis school from a television commercial. Despite coming from an academic rather than athletic family, her determination was absolute. Her early training took place against a backdrop of sanctions and the bombing of Serbia. One of the most enduring symbols of her resilience is the story of the swimming pool where a local sports center drained an Olympic sized pool and converted it into makeshift tennis courts. The physical boundaries of the pool walls meant she could not hit cross court shots without the point ending, and this limitation inadvertently forced her to develop one of the most feared down the line forehands in women’s tennis.
Success in such an environment required the total commitment of her family. Ivanović recalls her father riding a tiny Pony bicycle to take her to practice to save the family’s limited fuel coupons. Even as a child, she possessed a startling maturity and told her parents at age ten that if they could not afford individual lessons she should stop playing altogether because group sessions were no longer helping her progress. Her career almost ended at age twelve when her family ran out of money and she traveled to a tournament in France believing it would be her last. However, a sponsor noticed her potential there and invited her to a selection camp in Switzerland which led to the support she needed for her entire career.
The world remembers 2008 as the year Ivanović won Roland Garros and became world number one at just twenty years old. However, this milestone brought a shift that she found difficult to navigate as she moved from being the hunter to the hunted. An introverted child who used to cry before interviews and beg to play on side courts to avoid crowds, she suddenly became a global star. The pressure manifested physically and mentally, and shortly after her Grand Slam victory, a cyst in her right wrist forced her to withdraw from the Beijing Olympics which she describes as the hardest moment of her career. She eventually began suffering from severe panic attacks before matches and felt that tennis no longer belonged to her but rather to the expectations of sponsors and fans.
Her physical body eventually began to protest the years of all in commitment. In 2015, she broke her little toe while getting out of the shower. Because the bone never healed properly, she spent her final season playing in constant inflammation and even had to cut open her tennis shoes just to fit her swollen foot inside. The change in her movement led to further pain in her knee. Rather than lingering in the rankings as a shadow of her former self, she chose to retire in 2016 while still ranked number fifteen in the world.
Ana Ivanović’s story serves as a reminder that the tip of the iceberg, which includes the trophies and the number one ranking, is supported by a massive and unseen foundation of struggle. To the outside observer, she was a champion, but to herself, she was a perfectionist fighting a private battle against the very spotlight she had earned. Her journey teaches that success is not a destination where one stays forever but a chapter of life that requires the wisdom to embrace it and the strength to eventually let it go for the sake of one’s own well being.
