Steffi Graf

German tennis player Steffi Graf ranked as one of the top female tennis players of all-time and held the number one position for a record 377 weeks for nearly ten years starting in August 1987. She won 22 Grand Slam singles titles, and more than 100 tournament victories in total. Her titles include seven Wimbledon victories, six at Roland Garros, five in the US Open, four at the Australian Open and five WTA Tour Championships. Graf won her last Grand Slam title in 1999. In 1987 and 1992 she was on the German Federation Cup-winning team, and in 1993 won the Hopman Cup.

Graf’s best year was 1988 when she became the first woman in 18 years to win all Grand Slam tournaments in a single season. She also added the revived Olympic title, leaving the media to dub her season a “Golden Slam”. That year she also won the doubles bronze medal at the Seoul Olympics with Claudia Kohde-Kilsch.

Graf, who had already won the 1984 Olympic title when tennis was a demonstration sport, was heavily favoured to win the 1992 edition. However, after easily making it to the final, she was upset by American teenager Jennifer Capriati.

Steffi Graf had a brother who was two years her junior. Her parents, Heidi and Peter Graf, divorced in 1998, and in 1999 Graf separated from her long-time partner, the automobile racing driver Michael Bartels. At the winner’s ball of the 1999 French Open, she met up with the men’s winner Andre Agassi. The two married on October 22, 2001, and they subsequently had a son and a daughter.

Graf won numerous awards, among them Germany’s Sportswoman of the Year in 1987-89, and again in 1999, European Sportswoman of the Year 1987-88, and 1995, and World Sportswoman of the Year 1987-88. In 1999 Graf was awarded the Olympic Order and in 2004 was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of, and into the German Sports Hall of Fame in 2008.

Graf’s father Peter was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison for tax fraud in respect of his daughter’s earnings early in her career. The investigation against Steffi Graf personally was eventually dropped after she agreed to pay a fine. She maintained she had no idea about her finances when she was concentrating on sport.