Martina Navratilova | Biography, Titles, & Facts | Britannica (2024)

Martina Navratilova (born October 18, 1956, Prague, Czechoslovakia [now in Czech Republic]) is a Czech American tennis player who dominated women’s tennis in the late 1970s and the ’80s.

Navratilova played in her first tennis tournament at eight years of age. A left-handed player who ranked number one in Czechoslovakia from 1972 to 1975, she won international notice when she led her team to victory in the 1975 Federation Cup. In that year she went into exile in the United States because of the Czech government’s attempts to limit her tennis career. She was stripped of her Czech citizenship, and in 1981 she became a U.S. citizen. In 2008 she regained her Czech citizenship, thereby gaining dual citizenship.

From 1975 Navratilova was consistently one of the top five women tennis players. She made her first claim to the number-one position in 1978, after winning the Virginia Slims championship and the Wimbledon women’s singles final. In 1979 she again won the Wimbledon women’s singles as well as the women’s doubles and was ranked the undisputed top player.

In 1982 Navratilova won 90 of 93 matches, including 41 consecutive matches, and 15 tournaments, notably the Wimbledon women’s singles and the French Open women’s singles. The following year she won 86 of 87 matches, the U.S. Open women’s singles, the Wimbledon women’s singles, and the Australian Open women’s singles. Beginning with the 1983 Wimbledon title, she won six consecutive Grand Slam women’s singles titles. The 1980s also marked the height of her friendly rivalry with Chris Evert. Navratilova pitted her serve-and-volley game against Evert’s baseline style in 80 matches, winning 43 of them. In 1986 at Filderstadt, West Germany, she became the second player in modern tennis to win 1,000 matches.

By 1990 Navratilova had won the women’s singles championships of the French Open twice (1982, 1984), the Australian Open three times (1981, 1983, 1985), the U.S. Open four times (1983, 1984, 1986, 1987), and Wimbledon a record nine times (1978, 1979, 1982–87, 1990). In 1987, along with her singles championship, she won both the women’s doubles and the mixed doubles to become the first triple-crown champion at the U.S. Open since 1970. On winning her 158th title in 1992 in Chicago, Navratilova had accumulated more championships than any other player, male or female, in the history of tennis. She retired from singles play after the 1994 season, having won 167 titles in all.

Over the next two years Navratilova competed in only a handful of doubles events, and from 1997 to 1999 she did not play on tour. In 2000, however, she returned to professional play, competing in the doubles event at several tournaments, including Wimbledon. That same year she was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame. In 2003 she won the mixed doubles (with Leander Paes) at Wimbledon to tie Billie Jean King for most Wimbledon titles overall (20). With the victory, Navratilova, age 46, also became the oldest player to win at Wimbledon. After winning the mixed doubles at the U.S. Open in 2006, she retired from competitive play. Her career totals included 59 Grand Slam titles: 18 singles, 31 doubles, and 10 mixed doubles.

Navratilova’s autobiography, Martina (written with George Vecsey), was published in 1985. She also wrote, with Liz Nickles, a series of mysteries centred on the character Jordan Myles, a former tennis champion turned sleuth. The Total Zone (1994) was followed by Breaking Point (1996) and Killer Instinct (1997). One of the first sports superstars to acknowledge publicly that she was a lesbian, Navratilova also was active in the gay rights movement.