I depended on my body my whole life – then it let me down
Martina Navratilova tells Isobel James about surviving breast cancer, stripping off on TV – and speaking out in the highly charged debate over women’s sport
When Martina Navratilova was asked if she might consider disrobing on national television – bra and all – her initial reaction was, unsurprisingly, abject horror.
“It was a case of: ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” she laughs. “Absolutely no way.”
Fast-forward a few months, however, and here she is: one of eight female celebrities to have bared all in front of a whooping live theatre audience – and soon to millions more viewers at home.
It is, at least, for a good cause, marking the second outing of The All
New Monty: Ladies Night (don’t worry, there’s a men’s version, too), the TV show that aims to boost awareness of the importance of early health checks in preventing cancers – an end which, as the nine-times Wimbledon champion puts it, “justified the means”.
“I realised that however vulnerable I may have felt putting myself out there, the cause was so worthwhile I had to go for it,” she says. “It was a matter of life and death, so if I could contribute in some way to more people watching it and getting checked, then it was all good.”
Like the others taking part, among them returning star Victoria Derbyshire, who documented her breast cancer battle in a series of video diaries for the BBC, and Coleen Nolan, whose sister, Bernie, died from the disease in 2013, Navratilova, now 62, had her own highly personal reasons for agreeing to do the show – in her case, the diagnosis of a high-grade ductal carcinoma in situ (or DCIS) that followed a routine mammogram in 2010. This is the first time in years she has talked in depth about her cancer.
“I call it my personal 9/11,” she reflects now. “I was very lucky in that, at the end, it was very fixable, but at first you don’t know that. In that first moment you think your life expectancy has gone to ... well, you don’t know what. So it was a bombshell.”
Arguably even more so for a powerhouse athlete, widely considered one of the best female players of all time, with 18 Grand Slam singles victories under her belt. Yet cancer, that most democratic of diseases, has no respect for prowess or titles.
“I’d depended on my body my whole life – I’d treated it well and it had treated me well in return, so the diagnosis felt like a betrayal of sorts,” she admits. “And then there’s the loss of control over what’s going to happen. In my experience, you have an injury, you take care of it, you get better, or you have surgery, the doctors do their job and you get better – but this was totally out of my hands. So, it was terrifying.”
Fortunately, the cancer was confined to her milk ducts, and a lumpectomy (which leaves more minimal scarring) and radiation therapy led to an all-clear six months after her diagnosis. Yet nine years on, Navratilova confides that she still dreads her annual check, “even though I know I’ve long passed the threshold. You know that consciously, but subconsciously you dread it.”
The woman who, 11 years ago, cheerfully took part in the wartsand-all show I’m a Celebrity... admits the passage of time now makes her think twice about putting herself “out there”.
“I was recently approached to do a nude shoot for the body issue of Sports Illustrated and – nice as it was to be asked – that was a no, as even though it was a tasteful, ageaffirming, body-affirming exercise, it felt like that would be more of a vanity project,” she says. “I’m not a public individual – perhaps contrary to what is out there, I’m actually very private, and the older I’ve got, the more I want to protect that private space. When I wrote my autobiography more than 30 years ago, I wrote a lot more than I would say if I was doing it again now.”
Certainly, Navratilova’s life once played out far more publicly than now, from coming out as a lesbian in 1981 – the first woman in high-level sport to do so – to the televised palimony lawsuit that marked the end of her long-term relationship with former partner Judy Nelson in 1991. For a while, it seemed that Martina was as much in the news for her colourful affairs as she was for her tennis.
Those days are long gone: she’s been happily married for five years to 46-year-old Russian businesswoman and former model, Julia Lemigova. The couple are filmed for The All New Monty chatting over coffee, and while Navratilova has no desire to shine too much of a light on their relationship, she paints a contented picture of life at home in Miami – filled with family, sailing trips, skiing trips, cooking.
Still, it’s not as if she’s entirely retreated from public view: she’s back in the summer to take up her
‘I never accepted the social norms, I always question the rules’
annual commentating baton for Wimbledon, while the energy she used to plough into tennis is now directed into campaigning issues, with Navratilova vocal on issues from the environment and gay rights to personal liberty.
It’s something that she describes as instinctive for someone raised in Communist-era Czechoslovakia (she defected to the US in 1975, aged 18).
“Coming from the country I came from, I never accepted the social norms,” she says. “I always questioned the rules, I always questioned average – I never wanted to be average.”
Latterly, that instinct led her in to the highly-charged territory of the rights of transgender athletes to compete in women’s sport. It is “insane”, she wrote in a broadsheet, that “hundreds of athletes who have changed gender by declaration and limited hormone treatment have already achieved honours as women that were beyond their capabilities as men.”
She was instantly accused by campaigners of transphobia, a claim she vehemently rejects. “I know I don’t have all the answers,” she wrote in a blog on her website, “I don’t think there is a definitive answer here. That is why I want a debate, a conversation that includes everyone and is based, as I have said, not on feeling or emotion, but science, objectivity and the best interests of women’s sport as a whole.”
The subject is utterly verboten when we speak, despite Navratilova emphasising that her childhood left
her determined not to be silenced on subjects she cares about. “I always spoke up for the underdog and always will. I’ve always been speaking out, period – it’s part of the reason I left the country where I grew up, so now it cracks me up when people tell me what I should or shouldn’t be speaking out about.”
The following day, however, comes news of fresh controversy: Olympic 800m champion Caster Semenya – born with a disorder of sexual development, or DSD, sometimes also known as “intersex” – has lost her landmark case contesting the athletics’ governing body’s ruling that to be allowed to continue to compete, she must repress her abnormally high testosterone levels with hormones.
Navratilova told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that she is “personally, very disappointed” with the verdict: “Caster has been a champion of women, a champion sprinter and a champion athlete – she was born that way and she’s basically being told now, that that’s not good enough.”
If that sounds like something of a turnaround, this is “an exceptional situation”, she maintains. “DSD and
trans are two completely different things.” While there are very few people with DSD competing at elite level, “any male could say, ‘OK, I am really a woman’, and transition”.
She is not calling transgender athletes cheats, she clarifies, “I’m just saying the potential for cheating is there. Has it happened yet, I don’t know? Would it happen? Probably, because people have cheated for far less than hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The only answer is to assess the situation on “a case-by-case basis”. A “third category” might be one solution; what is not, is opening up the women’s category to anyone who identifies as one, “because that is the end of women’s sport as we know it”.
The subject is complicated enough that she is making a documentary about it, but a long way from where Navratilova would prefer the focus of this chat to be: on the events that led to that striptease at Alexandra Palace, alongside a mish-mash of reality and light entertainment stars, including twentysomething Love Islanders.
“I could be their grandmother or certainly their mother,” Navratilova says. “It crossed professions, age, experience, but we had fantastic camaraderie. When you go through an experience like this, it was terrifying and life-affirming at the same time.” Last-minute doubts as to whether she would find the courage to ping that last clip on her bra – afterwards, she let out “the biggest scream of my life” – were dispelled by her conviction that what she was doing could save lives.
“It gets people talking and that means they pay attention – and you can’t pay too much attention,” she says, citing Jana Novotna, her close friend and tennis champion who died of cancer in 2017 aged just 49, and whose death still brings her to tears.
“When it comes close to home, it’s difficult to talk about,” she says. “But it’s possible that Jana would still be alive if she had gone to the doctor earlier. So my encouragement is to women – and men – to go to the doctor if they think something is wrong.”
The All New Monty: Who Bares Wins begins on Monday on ITV at 9pm and concludes with The All New Monty: Ladies’ Night on Tuesday at 9pm