After days of rumours, Spanish tennis player Paula Badosa has confirmed that she is dating her Greek colleague Stéfanos Tsitsipàs. She, 25, and he, 24, are the new surprise couple of the season. And it all happens just a month after it was known that Paula had broken up with her partner of more than a year and a half, the Cuban model Juan Betancourt.
Badosa and Tsitsipas had been sharing photos on social networks for a few days in which they both appeared together and very smiling. Confirmation of the courtship has arrived via ¡Hola! magazine: “Yes, I’m dating him,” says the New Yorker by birth.
During the Roland Garros tournament, the athlete, who did not participate this year due to physical problems, could be seen attending as a spectator some of the matches played by her boyfriend, who ended up falling in the quarter-finals against Carlos Alcaraz .
Afterwards, the couple shared more images in which they were very close together in Dubai, where the Spaniard lives. Paula’s ex must not have liked these very complicit images, since Betancourt reacted with a publication with a very direct indirectness. The model and actor used his Instagram profile to upload a photo in a swimsuit accompanied by the phrase: “What you want to know, I live it, I don’t publish it.”
The love of Badosa and Tsitsipas is not the first or the last to emerge on the tennis courts. Among the most remembered is the love relationship that starred two of the greats of the racket, André Agassi and Steffi Graf. After a stormy marriage to actress Brooke Shields, the Las Vegas tennis player began dating Steffi in 1999 during the Wimbledon tournament. They married in 2001 and have two children. After more than 20 years together, the ex-tennis players, who together have 30 Grand Slam titles, are still happily married. As are Roger Federer and Mirka Vavrinec. The Swiss met at the 2000 Sydney Games, and since then they have been one of the strongest and most stable couples known. They married in 2009 and have four children.
Another legendary tennis couple was formed by two world number ones. Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert were engaged in 1974, the year they won Wimbledon. Although they got engaged, they did not go down the aisle. In 1979, Chris married another tennis player, John Lloyd, from whom she ended up divorcing.
The love story between Swede Bjorn Borg and Mariana Simionescu also reached the pages of the heart. After four years of courtship they married in 1980 in Romania in a ceremony that was considered the wedding of the century at the time. She gave up tennis after the wedding; he left it in 1982, at only 26 years old. They divorced in 1984.
In Spain, tennis players such as Fernando Verdasco and Feliciano López also have a love past tied to the tennis courts. Ana Boyer’s current husband was dating Ana Ivanovic in 2008; and Sandra Gago’s husband had a first tennis girlfriend, María Antonia Sánchez Lorenzo, with whom he dated between 2002 and 2005.
