Women in Sport
Andy Muyrray is doing battle with Novak Djokovic in the final of the Australian Open today, but in the build-up to the match I read this fascinating piece on the partnership Murray has established with his new coach, Amélie Mauresmo.
What struck me after reading the piece was that this kind of arrangement would be outlawed in certain Islamic countries where professional sport is discouraged among the masses - while grown men and women are forced to live completely separate lives.
Makes you think.
How Andy Murray may have found his perfect match in Amélie Mauresmo
Trailblazing coach who broke the mould and won Australian Open and Wimbledon rallies world number six back up the ranks
Andy Murray during a practice session for the Australian Open watched by coach Amélie Mauresmo. Photograph: Barbara Walton/EPA
His swearing fiancee Kim Sears may have attracted most of the headlines the following day, but in the seconds after Andy Murray served an ace on Thursday to win a place in the Australian Open final it was to another woman that he instantly turned.
After dispatching Tomas Berdych, Murray spun towards the players’ box and pointed to his coach, Amélie Mauresmo, with a long, unsmiling glare of satisfaction. Seven months after becoming the first elite male player in history to appoint a female coach who is not a family member, it was clear who Murray thanked for reaching his first grand slam final since winning Wimbledon in 2013, a long and bruising 19 months ago.
He had been widely criticised for appointing the 35-year-old, the player noted in an on-court interview moments later, but “I think so far this week we’ve shown that women can be very good coaches as well”. It had been a “brave” decision, he agreed, “so hopefully I can repay her in a few days”. The bravery, you will note, had been all hers.
If Murray can win Sunday’s final against Novak Djokovic, it will establish the Murray-Mauresmo partnership as one of the most remarkable in modern sporting history. But even if he fails to beat the world No 1, it is clear that Mauresmo has already changed the tennis landscape – and not for the first time.
Aside from the complete absence of female coaches in men’s tennis, when Murray hired Mauresmo in June 2014 there was only one top 50 player on the women’s tour who was coached by a woman. In the months since, the world No 6, Agnieszka Radwanska, has appointed Martina Navratilova as her coach and the promising American teenager Madison Keys has hired three-times grand slam winner (and mother of four) Lindsay Davenport.
“It seems like the door needed to be opened for it to become OK,” Davenport has said, “and obviously Murray was the one who kind of broke that down.” She had “got goosebumps”, she said, when she read that Murray had hired Mauresmo. Davenport’s delight is all the more notable as she and Mauresmo have a history.
Sixteen years ago, almost to the day, the then world No 1 Davenport was expected to cruise through the semi-final at Melbourne when an unseeded and largely unknown 19-year-old Frenchwoman brought her progress to a abrupt halt, with a display of aggressive physicality that stunned observers.
“She hits the ball so hard that it’s not like facing any other girl,” said Davenport of the teenage Amélie Mauresmo. “You just see this massive pair of shoulders bearing down on you.”
It had felt, she said, as if she was playing a man.
Though Mauresmo claimed to take the remark as a compliment, many felt it was not entirely intended to flatter. Mauresmo had arrived in Melbourne with her female partner, Sylvie Bourdon, and made a public statement during the tournament that she was gay, becoming the first French major sports personality to come out, and one of the first tennis players to do so at the start of her career. “She’s here with her girlfriend. She’s half a man,” sniffed the eventual winner Martina Hingis. Davenport later apologised for her comments.
It led to a period when, for all her prodigious talent, discussion of Mauresmo’s achievements was inevitably filtered through the lens of her private life and muscular physique. “Mighty Mauresmo hits form,” read the headlines, “Mauresmo has to shoulder all the pressure”. Or as one memorable Daily Telegraph article put it, “Muscular lesbian is a very nice girl, says world No 1”.
Though she posed proudly with her partner on the cover of Paris Match, Mauresmo was not impervious to her critics, a sensitivity that was also reflected in her play. According to Rémi Bourrieres of the French magazine Tennis, speaking to the Guardian at the time of her appointment: “She’s very sensitive. When she played she had a lot of emotion on court, and she needed to win [to gain confidence]. For some players things come very easily, but for some like Amélie you need to build the confidence, like a puzzle.”
The player developed a reputation for catastrophic collapses in confidence (“if there were a sizeable crowd watching she might choke on a teaspoonful of cod liver oil”, remarked one tennis writer) and for seven years the tennis press speculated over whether Mauresmo would be the most talented tennis player never to win a grand slam. Finally, in 2006, she triumphed in the Australian Open, and later, at Wimbledon. To prepare for the latter victory, she had spent some time training on the only grass court in Paris – in the garden of the British Embassy.
Mauresmo claims to recall very clearly the moment when she fell in love with tennis when, as a three-year-old, she watched her compatriot Yannick Noah triumph in the 1983 French Open. “I was impressed by the emotion he had on the court,” she has said. “I wanted to feel the same. I went out to the garden and was doing all the movements that he was doing.” Her parents bought her a racket and by the time she was seven she had been spotted by the French Tennis Federation.
She moved as a young teenager to a residential tennis school, but though she became world junior champion at 17, it was not a happy time. Two years later Mauresmo was quite clear in attributing her dramatic breakthrough at Melbourne to her new romantic partner – she was playing well, she said, because she was “so in love”. But the relationship with Bourdon led to an acrimonious rift with her parents which was only repaired some years later when the couple separated.
If Murray’s decision to appoint Mauresmo as his coach caused an impact “like a meteor [landing] on Planet Tennis”, in the words of the Guardian’s tennis writer Kevin Mitchell, it was not only because of her gender. Though she was (and remains) captain of the French Federation Cup squad and helped coach Marion Bartoli to Wimbledon victory in 2013, the Frenchwoman has always been clear that there was more to her life than tennis – she is a keen collector of fine wines, for instance – and she was initially resistant to the amount of travel from her Geneva home that the role involved.
But that sense of healthy distance from the game, along with the former player’s composed demeanour, may explain why the partnership is evidently working for Murray, according to the former British No 1 Anne Keothavong. “For whatever reason, I like to think Andy has been able to open up to Amélie. He is a strong character, and as a coach you have got to be able to understand what causes tension in your player, and how you can help relax them and keep them calm in the right moments.”
While there is no particular reason why a woman should be better at that than a man, in Murray’s case, notes Keothavong, “the two people who have the biggest influence on his life and whom he trusts the most have been his fiancee, Kim, and his mother, Judy. And maybe Amélie, being another calm, strong woman can add to that.”
Annabel Croft, the tennis commentator and former British No 1, says: ‘He definitely likes the way she works. I’ve watched her and she’s quite soft on the practice court, she puts the information across in a more feminine way. She’s not a hard taskmaster and I think he seems to like that.” Mauresmo has worked hard on Murray’s self-belief, and was instrumental in his decision to play a punishing schedule of tournaments during the autumn to haul his world ranking, which had sunk following back surgery a little over a year ago, back into the top 10 (“I wanted him to feel what it was like to win tournaments again,” she said).
But regardless of the Frenchwoman’s qualities, Croft says, “[Andy] loves to prove people wrong, and I feel like no matter what she’s telling him, he wants to prove to everybody that he made the right decision to hire her.”
As for the player himself, his comments this week about Mauresmo hint at an approach that is in welcome contrast to his previous coach, Ivan Lendl. “She’s very calm, that’s something that’s important for me. She listens well and she asks a lot of questions. Especially when you’ve been an ex-player, it’s easy to see things only through your eyes, but it’s important to learn what the player’s thinking.
“So far she’s been very good for me. It’s now down to me to produce the results on the court.”
On Sunday the pair have their opportunity to make history, but regardless of that result, Murray is clear on one consequence he’d like to see from their partnership. Taking to Twitter after his late-night semi-final win on Thursday, Murray wrote: “#MoreWomenInSport”, with a thumbs up emoticon. “Goodnight.”
His swearing fiancee Kim Sears may have attracted most of the headlines the following day, but in the seconds after Andy Murray served an ace on Thursday to win a place in the Australian Open final it was to another woman that he instantly turned.
After dispatching Tomas Berdych, Murray spun towards the players’ box and pointed to his coach, Amélie Mauresmo, with a long, unsmiling glare of satisfaction. Seven months after becoming the first elite male player in history to appoint a female coach who is not a family member, it was clear who Murray thanked for reaching his first grand slam final since winning Wimbledon in 2013, a long and bruising 19 months ago.
He had been widely criticised for appointing the 35-year-old, the player noted in an on-court interview moments later, but “I think so far this week we’ve shown that women can be very good coaches as well”. It had been a “brave” decision, he agreed, “so hopefully I can repay her in a few days”. The bravery, you will note, had been all hers.
If Murray can win Sunday’s final against Novak Djokovic, it will establish the Murray-Mauresmo partnership as one of the most remarkable in modern sporting history. But even if he fails to beat the world No 1, it is clear that Mauresmo has already changed the tennis landscape – and not for the first time.
Aside from the complete absence of female coaches in men’s tennis, when Murray hired Mauresmo in June 2014 there was only one top 50 player on the women’s tour who was coached by a woman. In the months since, the world No 6, Agnieszka Radwanska, has appointed Martina Navratilova as her coach and the promising American teenager Madison Keys has hired three-times grand slam winner (and mother of four) Lindsay Davenport.
“It seems like the door needed to be opened for it to become OK,” Davenport has said, “and obviously Murray was the one who kind of broke that down.” She had “got goosebumps”, she said, when she read that Murray had hired Mauresmo. Davenport’s delight is all the more notable as she and Mauresmo have a history.
Sixteen years ago, almost to the day, the then world No 1 Davenport was expected to cruise through the semi-final at Melbourne when an unseeded and largely unknown 19-year-old Frenchwoman brought her progress to a abrupt halt, with a display of aggressive physicality that stunned observers.
“She hits the ball so hard that it’s not like facing any other girl,” said Davenport of the teenage Amélie Mauresmo. “You just see this massive pair of shoulders bearing down on you.”
It had felt, she said, as if she was playing a man.
Though Mauresmo claimed to take the remark as a compliment, many felt it was not entirely intended to flatter. Mauresmo had arrived in Melbourne with her female partner, Sylvie Bourdon, and made a public statement during the tournament that she was gay, becoming the first French major sports personality to come out, and one of the first tennis players to do so at the start of her career. “She’s here with her girlfriend. She’s half a man,” sniffed the eventual winner Martina Hingis. Davenport later apologised for her comments.
It led to a period when, for all her prodigious talent, discussion of Mauresmo’s achievements was inevitably filtered through the lens of her private life and muscular physique. “Mighty Mauresmo hits form,” read the headlines, “Mauresmo has to shoulder all the pressure”. Or as one memorable Daily Telegraph article put it, “Muscular lesbian is a very nice girl, says world No 1”.
Though she posed proudly with her partner on the cover of Paris Match, Mauresmo was not impervious to her critics, a sensitivity that was also reflected in her play. According to Rémi Bourrieres of the French magazine Tennis, speaking to the Guardian at the time of her appointment: “She’s very sensitive. When she played she had a lot of emotion on court, and she needed to win [to gain confidence]. For some players things come very easily, but for some like Amélie you need to build the confidence, like a puzzle.”
The player developed a reputation for catastrophic collapses in confidence (“if there were a sizeable crowd watching she might choke on a teaspoonful of cod liver oil”, remarked one tennis writer) and for seven years the tennis press speculated over whether Mauresmo would be the most talented tennis player never to win a grand slam. Finally, in 2006, she triumphed in the Australian Open, and later, at Wimbledon. To prepare for the latter victory, she had spent some time training on the only grass court in Paris – in the garden of the British Embassy.
Mauresmo claims to recall very clearly the moment when she fell in love with tennis when, as a three-year-old, she watched her compatriot Yannick Noah triumph in the 1983 French Open. “I was impressed by the emotion he had on the court,” she has said. “I wanted to feel the same. I went out to the garden and was doing all the movements that he was doing.” Her parents bought her a racket and by the time she was seven she had been spotted by the French Tennis Federation.
She moved as a young teenager to a residential tennis school, but though she became world junior champion at 17, it was not a happy time. Two years later Mauresmo was quite clear in attributing her dramatic breakthrough at Melbourne to her new romantic partner – she was playing well, she said, because she was “so in love”. But the relationship with Bourdon led to an acrimonious rift with her parents which was only repaired some years later when the couple separated.
If Murray’s decision to appoint Mauresmo as his coach caused an impact “like a meteor [landing] on Planet Tennis”, in the words of the Guardian’s tennis writer Kevin Mitchell, it was not only because of her gender. Though she was (and remains) captain of the French Federation Cup squad and helped coach Marion Bartoli to Wimbledon victory in 2013, the Frenchwoman has always been clear that there was more to her life than tennis – she is a keen collector of fine wines, for instance – and she was initially resistant to the amount of travel from her Geneva home that the role involved.
But that sense of healthy distance from the game, along with the former player’s composed demeanour, may explain why the partnership is evidently working for Murray, according to the former British No 1 Anne Keothavong. “For whatever reason, I like to think Andy has been able to open up to Amélie. He is a strong character, and as a coach you have got to be able to understand what causes tension in your player, and how you can help relax them and keep them calm in the right moments.”
While there is no particular reason why a woman should be better at that than a man, in Murray’s case, notes Keothavong, “the two people who have the biggest influence on his life and whom he trusts the most have been his fiancee, Kim, and his mother, Judy. And maybe Amélie, being another calm, strong woman can add to that.”
Annabel Croft, the tennis commentator and former British No 1, says: ‘He definitely likes the way she works. I’ve watched her and she’s quite soft on the practice court, she puts the information across in a more feminine way. She’s not a hard taskmaster and I think he seems to like that.” Mauresmo has worked hard on Murray’s self-belief, and was instrumental in his decision to play a punishing schedule of tournaments during the autumn to haul his world ranking, which had sunk following back surgery a little over a year ago, back into the top 10 (“I wanted him to feel what it was like to win tournaments again,” she said).
But regardless of the Frenchwoman’s qualities, Croft says, “[Andy] loves to prove people wrong, and I feel like no matter what she’s telling him, he wants to prove to everybody that he made the right decision to hire her.”
As for the player himself, his comments this week about Mauresmo hint at an approach that is in welcome contrast to his previous coach, Ivan Lendl. “She’s very calm, that’s something that’s important for me. She listens well and she asks a lot of questions. Especially when you’ve been an ex-player, it’s easy to see things only through your eyes, but it’s important to learn what the player’s thinking.
“So far she’s been very good for me. It’s now down to me to produce the results on the court.”
On Sunday the pair have their opportunity to make history, but regardless of that result, Murray is clear on one consequence he’d like to see from their partnership. Taking to Twitter after his late-night semi-final win on Thursday, Murray wrote: “#MoreWomenInSport”, with a thumbs up emoticon. “Goodnight.”
Am̩lie Mauresmo Рa potted profile
Born 5 July, 1979, in St Germain-en-Laye, near Paris.
Age 35.
Career Former world junior champion who after a dazzling breakthrough at the Australian Open in 1999 struggled to achieve at the highest level until she finally won two grand slams in 2006.
High point Claiming the title in Melbourne in January 2006, after being dismissed for many years as a “choker”.
Low point Catastrophic defeat in the first round of the 2001 French Open when, despite being the local favourite, her confidence collapsed and she froze on court.
What she says “Personally I wouldn’t be able to work with a man or a woman player without having a good connection. It doesn’t happen immediately. I’m not the type of person who opens up that easily. Andy is the same. It took a bit of time, but the relationship is good.”
What they say “If Andy’s looking for someone who can help him deal with the pressure, he hired the perfect person. Amélie is able to take all the stress away and make a player feel comfortable” – Marion Bartoli, who Mauresmo helped coach to Wimbledon victory in 2013.
