“I believe in living life on my own terms,” said a calm Sania Mirza with a certainty that only comes from years of doing the same. Sania, one of India’s greatest sporting icons, spent close to two decades rewriting the narrative around what it means to be a woman athlete – in a world that often prefers its women agreeable and apologetic. In an exclusive conversation with RevSportz, Sania opened up on Grand Slam titles to Olympic heartbreaks, from motherhood to retiring on her own terms. She has lived her life with resolve and a mantra: to stay true to herself.
How has life evolved post-retirement?
Sania: Yeah, evolve is probably the right word. You know, luckily as sports people, I feel that we have the option of starting a new life when we’re still quite young, even though we’ve had this whole big life behind us. So, it’s been really nice discovering new things. It’s been really nice trying out new things and also spending a lot more time at home. I think that’s something that I really wanted to do. But yeah, it’s been busy, but it’s been on my own terms. So, it’s been really good.
You talked about evolution and spending your childhood playing the sport. A lot of athletes who start very young have difficulty with self-identity, separating themselves from their sport. Is that something you struggled with?
Sania: I actually didn’t. And I don’t think that I struggled enough to say that I had a hard time dealing with it. Yes, there are moments that you miss certain parts of that life. But I feel that I did it long enough to really live that part of my life fully. And one of the reasons that I retired, when I retired, when everybody was like, ‘Oh, but you’ve just made a final of the Grand Slam’, was because I wanted to do it on my own terms. And that’s really how I believe in living life, on my own terms. And that goes on, you know, in my professional career as well.
So, the short answer is no, I didn’t have that difficulty. But the longer answer is yeah, there are still some moments when I watch tennis matches. Or I watch people competing, I still miss that feeling of winning. Because no matter what I do in my life, I will never be able to replicate the actual feeling of winning a tennis match or walking on a big court. And I think that’s the feeling that you feel that is missing from your life because you’re trying to find that high and that high is very, very hard to find ever again.
I just feel that we all have to accept that life changes when things evolve. And I think that acceptance is very, very important to actually just acknowledge and say that, ‘yes, my life has changed and now I’m going to try to do different things’.
And who is Sania, when not a tennis player? Who is she behind the scenes?
Sania: Sania is…I’m an extreme home body, like almost too extreme. So, I really like staying home. I really like to stay and just be in my own world. I have a close set of friends, close set of family. That’s the people that I like to be around and be with. And I don’t really feel the need to go out because I feel like I can’t be myself. So, I’m somebody who likes to be myself.
And that’s why I like to be at home. I like to be with friends at home who I can be myself with, because most of the time when we’re doing events, shoots, we’re really not ourselves. And that’s who I am.
Inwardly, I’m an extremely lazy person. Like if you tell me what’s your most favorite thing to do, I know it comes as a shocker, but I’ll just be in my pajamas and watch TV or like Netflix, stuff like that. I’m not adventurous and like, ‘Oh, my God, I want to go to the mountains’. I don’t like doing any of that. So that’s who I really am.
Do you think there’s a huge difference in being a public figure, especially a woman sportsperson, then versus now because of social media?
Sania: Yeah, it is very hard. It’s very, very difficult. I’m a closet introvert, to be very honest. And that’s why I’m not a person who loves to open up and give pieces of myself out there.
But the irony of my life has been that I’ve been in the public eye since a very, very young age. So, I have tried my best to fiercely protect whatever I could, some private parts of my life. I’ve worked very hard for that because that is very important to me.
But till today, if I walk into a restaurant, I have a sense of anxiousness that people are going to turn and look, that’s the introvert in me. But I’ve had to train myself into not being that person, obviously, and being somebody who embraces that.
So that’s been a constant push and pull for me, so to say, in my life. But today, after all this, I have to accept that that is who I am. That’s a part of my life and it’s a very big part of my life. And that’s probably one of the reasons why I like staying home so much. And I like staying indoors so much so I can be myself.
Back when you started out and really began capturing headlines, it wasn’t easy. They had so much to say about how you carried yourself, what you wore, what your body looked like. How did it all affect you?
Sania: I won’t say that it wasn’t difficult, of course. I mean, you’re 16, 17, 18 years old. You’re still becoming the woman that you’re probably going to be and you’re still figuring yourself out in many ways.
All my friends were talking and worrying about how they’re going to bunk college or school and go and find a coffee shop to sit at. And I’m over here trying to deal with questions about all kinds of serious issues going on in the world and then being judged about it. So, life was always different for me.
I think I was very lucky to have parents who protected me so fiercely. And until the time that I realized what it really was, I was mature enough to understand how to deal with it. But the one thing it did, it makes you extremely thick skinned and it makes you extremely almost oblivious to what other people are saying that it honestly doesn’t matter.
Having said that, there are some days that are worse than the others, but on most days it doesn’t matter.
As a young woman trying to grow up, did you ever feel like you had to strike a balance between your femininity and being successful?
Sania: I think that there are two different things. First of all, I think that what you’re talking about, the sexism and those kinds of comments, that exist in the normal world. You don’t have to be an athlete for that.
So, you can just be a normal woman, and you’ll have to deal with “don’t sit like this”, “don’t talk too loudly”, “don’t play outside”, “you’ll get too dark”, “don’t do this”, “don’t play with boys”. So that is stuff that any girl deals with, especially from the subcontinent, I feel.
So that is a little bit that we all deal with. Now you multiply that by putting it on a scale of like a million where you’re being told those things in the newspapers, on TV channels, and then on social media.
Yes, it is hard. So, did I have to strike a balance? No, because I tried to be myself. And whether you accepted that or liked it or didn’t like it was not really my problem. My problem was that I was being true to myself and that for me is my biggest strength.
I feel that when I lay down in bed by myself, I should be able to think and feel and my conscience should feel that I’ve been true to myself today. And that is something that I take a lot of pride in.
So now, whether you like that or not is not my issue or concern. If you have a notion in your head that this is how an athlete should look, this is how a female athlete should behave, this is how a female athlete should speak or should not be is really not my problem.
What my thing is, I feel that I am representing myself, I’m representing my family, I’m representing my country and my state. And I want to, and I will do everything in my ability to do the best that I can to represent that in the best way possible. So now that can be agreed and disagreed with, and it depends on an opinion.
Do you think society still has a hard time accepting self-assured confident women?
Sania: The fact is that we do live in a man’s world, and we do live in a world where we’d much rather have a woman say yes and I don’t know, rather than a woman say no. So, I do feel that we are in a much better place than we were 30 years ago, but we still have some way to go.
And having said that, I’m not saying that it only exists in this part of the world. It is very much everywhere, even in the west. If it wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be sitting here and talking about oh, “should women still get equal prize money?”, because you know that is there in the international world, that’s there in the western world. So, this disparity exists and that’s a fact, and as a woman you can get away with way less than a man can.
Talking about sport and failure, there’s this saying that champions rise, champions get back up. But nobody ever teaches you that you also have to forgive yourself over and over after failing. Your thoughts about that?
Sania: That’s what sport teaches you because if you don’t forgive yourself, like in a period of a match which is two and a half hours, you have to forgive yourself hundreds of times every time you miss a point. Because if you don’t forgive yourself, you can’t come out and play the next point.
So that’s what sport teaches you. Sport teaches you how to get over failure. It teaches you how to be resilient when you are failing. It teaches you how to have commitment towards what you believe. It teaches you sacrifice. It teaches you how to deal with victory with humility.
So, sport teaches you all of that and those are life lessons that no other education can teach you in my opinion and that’s why sport is so important.
Some people have a harder time dealing with it and again I think you have to give credit to the people around you for almost making a protective wall around you to allow you to feel the loss as little as possible. Because you will still feel it and then to give you that courage that it’s okay if you’ve had a bad day. Sport teaches you that no matter how bad the day is, if you want there to be a tomorrow, you can come back in the morning and try again.
And I think that’s so important in life as well. When I have a bad day in life, I’m like it’s okay. It’s over. Let me just sleep and tomorrow is a new day.
If I think of your career, two moments come to mind. 2008, pulling out of Beijing, and of course, 2016 Rio as well. Talk me through those two experiences. How did you deal with it mentally?
Sania: I think that the Beijing one was less painful than the one in Rio because we were very, very close to winning that medal. And if I look back at my career and say, ‘Oh, I’ve done everything that I really wanted and more’, that’s probably the one thing that I haven’t been able to do – get a medal at the Olympics.
And I’ve been at four Olympics and a lot of people for all their lives take pride in representing their countries at one Olympics, and I’ve had the pleasure and honour of doing that four times. But it was a very, very hard day and sometimes me and Rohan [Bopanna] talk about it and we’re still like “how did that happen?”. And it’s been nine years now. It’s still a very fresh thing.
Some losses hurt more than the others but that’s the amazing part about being a sportsperson, no matter what, you have to get over it. On the day that we lost, we were both on the bus the same evening going to the airport. It was just me and him. We were on our way from Rio to Cincinnati. We didn’t even get seats on the planes because everything was booked out. He got on a different flight, I got on a different flight.
We did Cincinnati a few hours later, 8-10 hours later, and we were on the court practicing within 24 hours after that loss because we had to play. That was on Sunday, and we had a match on Tuesday night or Wednesday. And then what happened? Then you forget that that has happened, right? Because I went into Cincinnati, and I won that tournament. So that’s how you have to get over it. That’s just the way life goes as an athlete. If you hold on to things that have hurt you or the losses that have hurt you, you are not going to be able to succeed.
Motherhood changes you. Was it clear in your head that you were going to make a comeback?
Sania: So I think that when a woman becomes a mother, everyone treats it like it’s the end of her life first of all. Forget the end of her career. They treat it like, now she’s just going to have one or two kids and if she dares to put herself first, it’s all, ‘Oh, but who’s taking care of the child? What’s going to happen?’
And I’m so glad that has changed now. Like how many mothers do you see on the tennis court and all over global sport, but tennis in general, there are just so many mothers in the top hundred now. And it’s amazing to see because this is a stereotype that needed to be broken. To put yourself and love yourself and still put your dreams out there, it’s not criminal. It’s not criminal to do that.
And for me, was it always clear that I was going to make a comeback after Izhaan? Yeah, I think so. That’s why I didn’t announce my retirement. It was a different story that I was 23 kilos overweight when that happened, and I was like: ‘Wow, how am I going to do this?’ But yeah, it was something that I knew that I still had tennis left in me. And you know, obviously I still had success after coming back so I was right about that.
Motherhood changes every perspective in life. Everything changes. Losing a tennis match, losing Rio, not getting a medal there seems like a very small problem to have when you have a child.
Becoming a parent is the single greatest feeling that you can have. And the amazing part is that feeling only grows as you keep going. And any parent will tell you that.
So, your entire perspective of life changes, your entire perspective of losses changes.
Losses that hurt more will hurt less because now I go back to my son and he says, ‘I love you’ and gives me a hug no matter whether I win or I lose. It makes absolutely zero difference to anything in life. So those are the moments that really evolve you as a person, I feel.
Finally, a message to the young girls who want to be like you.
Sania: I’ve always said the same thing and I’ll continue to say the same, that no matter how many people tell you that you can’t do something, believe in yourself. Because as young girls we’re told much more that we can’t do something rather than we can. At every given point of our lives from the time we are born, we’re told you can’t go out at night, you can’t do this, you can’t talk like this, you can’t sit like this, you can’t speak so loudly, you can’t do that, you can’t do this.
So, we’re constantly told that we can’t do things. So don’t let anybody make you believe that. Because if you really want to, you can do anything in life.
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