Monica Seles and myasthenia gravis, the former tennis player affected by the neuromuscular disease: "I struggle even to dry my hair."
The tale of the legend
Monica Seles , the former American tennis player of Yugoslavian origins, suffers from myasthenia gravis , a neurological autoimmune disease that was diagnosed in 2022.
The 51-year-old tennis legend herself, who won nine Grand Slam titles in her career before retiring in 2003, said it.
Seles's announcement came on the eve of the US Open, the highly anticipated final Grand Slam of the 2025 season, starting August 24. Her goal? To raise awareness about a disease that's not particularly well-known but can have enormous physical effects.
The former tennis player told the Associated Press that he first noticed the signs while playing tennis with children or family members, when he realized he was missing the ball because he saw two balls. Symptoms include double vision , as well as weakness in the arms and legs.
“These are symptoms you can't ignore. For me, it was the beginning of this journey.” Seles then consulted a doctor and a neurologist, who confirmed the disease three years ago: “That's when this journey began. And it took me a while to really process it, to talk about it openly, because it's a difficult thing to do. It's impacting my daily life significantly. Even drying my hair has become difficult .”
But Monica Seles has faced many challenges in her life, full of successes and failures : at 13, she left Yugoslavia for the United States, without knowing a word of English. Three years later, when she was still a 16-year-old teenager, she won her first Grand Slam title at Roland Garros , dealing with an extraordinary career and equally extraordinary media pressure.
In 1993 , during the Hamburg tournament, she was attacked with a knife on the court by an obsessive and morbid fan of Steffi Graf , her great German rival. The incident shocked the young Monica: the tennis player suffered a minor back injury, but the psychological shock was devastating and led her to abandon tennis for two years. She returned in 1995, and although she won her fourth Australian Open the following year, Seles never reached her pre-retirement peaks, until she finally retired from tennis in 2003.
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