Jana Novotna fought legendary duels with Steffi Graf, now the former Wimbledon winner has died after a long fight against cancer. The Czech woman was only 49 years old.
Jana Novotna cried bitterly, she rubbed her red eyes. In the 1993 Wimbledon final she looked like the sure winner, but then Steffi Graf won the title again.
And so Novotna walked to Kent’s Duchess with tears in her face as a beaten woman to pick up her silver plate for second place. The Duchess reacted with royal sentiment, she spoke well to Novotna and finally pulled her affectionately to her shoulder. Novotna’s body trembled.
The touching pictures went around the world at that time:”I was very happy in the first few seconds. Then I saw her…”, Steffi Graf once said about this moment. Now the tennis fans remember this scene, Novotna died peacefully among her family on Sunday at the age of 49. The Czech woman has lost her long fight against cancer.
“After my defeat I let my feelings out and showed the spectators the human side of tennis. This made me a winner in spite of defeat,”Novotna once said in an interview with Tennis Magazine about the dramatic final.
Novotna was already leading 4:1,40:30 in the third set with her own serve, so she had a match ball to 5:1. Suddenly, however, the game turned. Double error Novotna, the blonde with the headband struck all at once simplest balls, she had her nerves as so often not under control. Graf ends the match with a smash-ball.
Novotna described herself as “very sensitive”, she had “never been one of those tennis machines”,”hitting the ball and showing no emotion”. 24 titles she won in the singles, in the third attempt in 1998 also in Wimbledon (against Nathalie Tauziat), Novotna was the number two in the world at her best times.
Many experts thought the right-handed woman had even more success, but too often she lost her nerves at the decisive moment.
“Sometimes you don’t make the best decisions during a match, and then you lose,”she once said:”My strong emotions might have helped me to fail,” but because she admitted feelings on the tennis court, Novotna was so popular with the fans. 1999 she ended her career and in 2005 she was accepted into the Hall of Fame.
And again and again, Novotna was asked about this one match in the summer of 1993 in Wimbledon,”Steffi and I had our careers at the same time, so to speak. We played against each other more than 30 times, she always stopped me just before the finish,”said Novotna:”It was hard for me. But we’ve always treated each other with respect.”
With tears in her eyes, Novotna proudly held up her silver plate, the audience applauded, just like the Duchess of Kent and Steffi Graf.