Harrowing truth behind tennis star’s success
Jelena Dokic rose to become the world No 4 but her new autobiography reveals that her on-court triumphs masked a horrifically abusive relationship with her father
IN 1999 16-year-old Jelena Dokic made headlines around the world when she beat Martina Hingis, the number one seed, in the first round at Wimbledon. At the time Jelena was a little-known qualifier ranked 129th in the world and she did not so much beat Hingis as annihilate her in only 54 minutes.
The 6-2 6-0 result left tennis pundits reeling. Who was the intense blonde prodigy who never smiled?
By the time she reached the Wimbledon semi-finals that year, interest in Jelena had reached fever pitch. And it was then that things started to go badly wrong.
Being a top player is pressure enough but Jelena was destined to spend the most exciting years of her career battling not only her opponents but also her father Damir Dokic’s outrageous behaviour. Soon his antics were eclipsing coverage of his daughter’s game.
The truck driver, who fled Yugoslavia with his family in 1994 to settle in Australia, had already been ejected from the Edgbaston tournament in June 1999 after drunkenly accusing officials of being Nazis who supported the bombing of Yugoslavia. He was then arrested for lying in the road and jumping on the bonnet of a car.
Damir was loyally defended by his talented daughter who told journalists: “The English are a bit fussy.”
However, things only got worse. He was thrown out of Wimbledon the following year for stamping on a journalist’s phone and was later banned for six months after arguing over the price of salmon sandwiches at the US Open.
To many, he was the ultimate pushy tennis parent whose passion for his daughter’s success led him to express his frustrations in a volatile but ultimately harmless way.
MEANWHILE, Jelena, who rose to No 4 in the women’s rankings by the age of 19 and was herself earning a reputation for being tense and uncooperative, insisted that she was not bothered by her father’s antics.
“He’s always been with me in tennis and is a big influence,” she said at the age of 17. “I like having him around. It doesn’t bother me.”
But now it has emerged that behind closed doors it was a very different story.
In her autobiography, Unbreakable, the Australian tennis star has detailed the years of physical and emotional abuse she suffered at his hands.
Damir apparently decided his daughter would be the family’s meal ticket after she showed an aptitude for the game at the early age of six.
Having emigrated to Australia, the family struggled to make ends meet and she was constantly told: “You are our way out of this.” Jelena, now 34, explains: “I knew that he was motivated by money and I constantly tried to play well to earn more and more. I was doing so well but it wasn’t enough.”
Her father put her on a punishing training schedule before and after school. She claims he sometimes ordered her to stand for hours, slapped her across the face or hit the back of her head with a shoe. She says he would whip a leather belt across her shins or ask her to remove her shirt and use it to lash her back.
One beating, described in the book, was so bad she lost consciousness. Another time the police were called, only for Jelena to deny anything had happened.
“I was playing out of fear,” she Daily Express Friday November 17 2017 says. “There was no real excitement or happiness. I was really breaking down inside. It was so tough for me to play a professional sport that is very brutal.”
In the book Jelena claims that even if she won a match she knew what would be waiting for her back at the hotel – retribution for any obvious errors. Sometimes the abuse began in the car or in front of her younger brother Savo but it was never in front of anyone outside the family and never to a point that she couldn’t play.
As she got older the verbal abuse got worse. “He’d call me a whore, or a bitch or dumb and hopeless,” she says. “I lost all my confidence and self-esteem.”
Her father has not commented on the allegations in his daughter’s book but has previously denied mistreating her. “I love tennis,” says Jelena, who retired in 2014. “But it was hard for me to enjoy certain successes I had because of what I was going through.”
In 2001 Damir accused the Australian tennis authorities of rigging the Australian Open draw to his daughter’s disadvantage. He then took the family back to Serbia.
When Jelena met her first boyfriend in 2002, the Brazilian Formula One driver Enrique Bernoldi, her father agreed they could have a relationship if she signed over all her assets, amounting to millions, and a big chunk of her future earnings.
SHORTLY afterwards, Jelena found the courage to do a midnight flit to escape his clutches. “I left with just my racquet bag and my suitcase. I had no money, no credit card, I signed everything over to him a couple of months earlier,” she recalls.
“I think he thought that I was too scared to do it and that I would always stay no matter what.”
By 2005, Jelena was back in Australia trying to rebuild her career away from her father’s malevolent influence.
However, the following year at the 2006 Australian Open he threatened to drop a nuclear bomb on Sydney and kill an Australian citizen in retaliation for her decision to play for the country again.
“It’s just as hard after you leave, that’s the important thing for people to realise,” says Jelena.
“He made life difficult for me. It led me to dealing with really heavy depression and almost committing suicide.”
Since 2004, Jelena has been in a relationship with Tin Bikic, the brother of her ex-coach. He has supported her in the struggle to emotionally and financially disentangle herself from her father, who spent 12 months in prison in 2009 for threatening the Australian ambassador to Serbia with a hand grenade.
She now works in Australia as a sports commentator, tennis coach and motivational speaker and you might think she would have no desire for any contact with her father ever again.
But the instinct to love one’s parents is a deep, hard-wired drive for connection. Even now, despite the decades of reprehensible treatment, Jelena still craves a relationship with the man who lives on a luxury ranch near Belgrade that he bought with her hardearned winnings.
As she says: “Even at this stage, if he wanted to change I would still give him a chance.”