The tennis ace on the ban on Russian players, mental health in sport, gun laws… and why this year’s Wimbledon crowd will be very loud
We’ve been fighting for decades, so it’s peculiar that in male sports, they’re still terrified of coming out
How have attitudes changed? Her children, aged 16 and 20, have gay friends and for them “it’s a non-issue,” which provides great satisfaction for Navratilova. She says: “We’ve been fighting for decades, so it’s peculiar that in some places within society, nobody cares, but in others like male sports, they’re terrified of coming out.
Navratilova used to hunt game but gave it up, along with meat, 20 years ago. She favours regulating rather than banning guns. “I wouldn’t take people’s guns away,” she says, “I want to incentivise them to hand them over, like they have done in Australia.” Drown gun owners in paperwork, she says: “[Then] we will see how badly you really have to have the assault rifle whose only purpose is to kill as many people as quickly as possible.
But what about the changing nature of stress in the modern sporting world? “If social media is your biggest problem,” she says, “you’ve got it good, because you have an option of staying away from it.
Navratilova looks back fondly at the rivalries in the women’s game during her heyday: “Chris [Evert] and I, that’s a rivalry for the ages in terms of longevity,” she says. She worries that great rivalries have not been so much in evidence in the past 10 years. “The women fluctuate a lot more with their ability,” she says, “and that means you don’t get the rivalry because they don’t play one another enough at the top of the game, and you need that.
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