‘I felt stupid saying I was world No 1 – I couldn’t handle it’
Dinara Safina and Marat Safin are unique as siblings who topped rankings, yet they cut very different figures, writes Simon Briggs
Dinara Safina stood in front of her bathroom mirror, looked herself in the eye, and said, “I am No 1. I am the best.” It sounds like a scene from a mushy motivational movie – Dead Poets Society, perhaps, or A League of Their Own. But Safina experienced no surge of inspiration. No matter how she delivered the words, they just didn’t feel right.
“Maybe for somebody it works,” she says during a Zoom call from her home in Monaco. “Maybe it helps self-motivation or selfconfidence. But you have to be the kind of person who believes this. If you don’t believe, saying that makes no sense. You can repeat a thousand, million times. But you look at yourself and say, ‘I am stupid, saying this to myself.’ ”
The scene dates from Safina’s defining season of 2009 – a bewildering, discombobulating, emotional switchback ride which would have sent anyone to the psychologist’s couch.
That was the year she reached successive major finals in Melbourne and Paris, winning 53 of her first 64 matches. The trend pointed ever upwards, and yet the graph never spiked in a defining peak: the conquest of that elusive grand-slam trophy.
In those two major finals, Safina collected a combined tally of nine games against Serena Williams and Svetlana Kuznetsova. She ran full tilt into a mental block.
“Sometimes I couldn’t handle the pressure,” admitted Safina, who is still only 34. “That’s me personally. Still in the normal life I am very hard on myself. Everything has to be perfect – like this, like this, like this.
“And sometimes, when the result was not what I expected, or what I would wish, I would get so disappointed.”
Safina hails from a uniquely distinguished
Russian tennis family. Her mother, Rauza
Islanova, used to coach at the Spartak
Moscow club with her babies suspended in a sling. Her father, Mikhail
Safin, was the director of that club. And her brother, Marat, was the buccaneering, vodka-loving hellraiser who won the 2000 US
Open as well as the
2005 Australian
Open, which would prove to be the last slam for almost five years to escape the
“Big Three” men.
Marat and Dinara still stand unique as the only brother/ sister duo to both reach No1 in the world. Yet they are remembered very differently: him as the cool, sunglasseswearing type known for inviting women to watch him play, her as the nearly woman who never cemented her position at the top of the game.
Did she ever ask him for advice on how to handle her anxieties? “It’s tough to speak with Marat, because I think male and female are very different,” Safina replied. “Whenever he has a stress situation for him it is a challenge – ‘What can I do out of this situation?’ For them [male players] it’s fun. For a female it is more like ‘Oh my God, if I play bad, I will be so embarrassed.’ You start to doubt in yourself.”
If Safina never managed to overcome her big-match nerves, that is partly because her body did not give her the chance. A stress fracture in her lower back cut her career brutally short at the age of 25, and left her bracketed alongside Jelena Jankovic as a late-noughties world No 1 who never won a major. (Caroline Wozniacki, the final member of this maligned trio, would eventually escape the “slamless No 1” slur by winning the 2018 Australian Open.) What next for Safina, who officially retired in 2014? Having lacked expert guidance in her own career, she now wants to steer younger players away from the same pitfalls. Before the pandemic started, she had been planning a new coaching initiative in Valencia.
“I would have loved to have had a mentor,” said Safina. “Psychologists say basic things, but they have never been in the situation – not even as visitors to the match.
“For me, maybe it would have been more interesting to speak to some other tennis player. After the [2009] French Open final, I had that scarring in my heart. I was maybe one week being depressed – ‘How can I lose this final?’– instead of thinking, ‘OK, what is next coming up, and what can I do better?’ I would love at that moment to have had a mentor who shakes me a little and says, ‘Wait, it’s just the French Open final, you still have Wimbledon, you still have the US Open, so stop focusing on this.’” True to her Moscovian roots, Safina is hard-headed about the disciplines that foster success. During our conversation, she spoke about her 5.30am starts at the Australian Open, fretted about the distracting influence of electronic gadgets and denounced Instagram as a “fake world where nobody knows what is true”. Some youngsters might retreat from her directness; others would surely thrive on it. Either way, she is well qualified to join Conchita Martinez and Amelie Mauresmo as elite performers now turned to coaching.
“Conchita is doing great,” said Safina of Martinez, the former Wimbledon champion who has worked with Karolina Pliskova and Garbine Muguruza. “I just wonder why other players don’t ask, ‘Can I work with you?’ or, ‘Can I have you at least as part-time coach?’ “I think there are so many players would really love to share their experience and they can be really helpful. We know tennis from a different way, we have been there, we have played.
“It would be more interesting to have more female coaches. When you are on the tour as a player, you have the team, the coach, the agent, who talk to you and you never lift up your head and say, ‘Wait – can I just look around?’ Instead open your eyes a little bit, step back. Say ‘The agent is not going to tell who is for me, I’m going to say who I want.’ Because you can always find the number of the person you want and talk to him or her. It’s not that we live on another planet.”