Martina Navratilova’s 16-year age gap to model wife and cancer diagnosis

Hailed as one of the greatest tennis players of all time, Martina Navratilova was virtually unstoppable at Wimbledon throughout the 1980s. A maestro on grass, the Czech-American icon won a record nine ladies’ singles titles at the All England Club – a Grand Slam record for women in the Open Era.

Six of those triumphs came in consecutive years between 1982 and 1987, while she also enjoyed remarkable success in doubles, lifting seven women’s doubles titles and four mixed doubles crowns. The 69-year-old will return to SW19 this week as part of the BBC’s live coverage, joining a star-studded punditry team featuring fellow tennis greats John McEnroe, Billie Jean King, Andre Agassi and Pat Cash.

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Navratilova, who spent an astonishing 332 weeks ranked world No.1 during her illustrious playing career, currently lives across the pond in Miami with her wife, former model Julia Lemigova. Aged 16 years younger than Navratilova, Lemigova has enjoyed a remarkable life of her own.

Born in Moscow to a former Red Army colonel, she was crowned Miss USSR in 1990 before finishing runner-up at the Miss Universe pageant the following year. Before meeting Navratiova, she had a daughter with French banker Edouard Stern, who was later murdered by his mistress in 2005,and also has another daughter from a previous relationship.

More recently, she has found fame as one of the stars of The Real Housewives of Miami – making history as the first housewife in the franchise’s history to be married to another woman. The couple tied the knot in New York in 2014 after Navratilova proposed live on television during the US Open in front of thousands of fans.

But their love story began many years earlier, with the pair first crossing paths in a Paris nightclub in 2000. Speaking on Married to a Celebrity: The Survival Guide, the tennis legend recounted the story of their first meeting.

“I was at a club with some friends, a gay bar in Paris,” she said. “We’re sitting here, we’re dancing and then we sit down and then there’s this gorgeous woman standing at the bar and she’s like…looking at me. I gave this Russian look to her. Really, it was more like, ‘Okay, you are coming to talk to me now.”

However, romance did not blossom immediately, with the couple instead reconnecting eight years later during the French Open. After rekindling their relationship, Navratilova and Lemigova began discussing starting a family together, but plans were put on hold in early 2023 when the 18-time Grand Slam winner was diagnosed with stage 1 throat and breast cancer.

“When you’re adopting a child, it has to be about the child. And, right now, it’s everything about Martina, and for her getting healthy, so we are putting it on hold,” Lemigova explained. “You know, we were thinking any moment, the agency would call and give us happy news that we’re going to have a baby… instead, we are fighting two cancers.”

Thankfully, Navratilova announced later that year that she was cancer free, allowing the couple to revisit their plans to become parents. In August 2024, they revealed they were “over the moon” after adopting two young boys.

Speaking to Entertainment Tonight in 2025 about the adoption and how Navratilova's relationship with the boys is different to the one she has with her two daughters, Julia said: “There's a difference between girls and boys. She's now with the boys, playing sports with them, teaching tennis, teaching baseball, teaching basketball. She's having such a blast. She's becoming like a kid herself, I feel, like 20 years younger. It's a completely different Martina that I'm seeing.”

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