Dokic opening up about abuse from dad almost as shocking as her switch to team Yugoslavia

Former Australian player Jelena Dokic has once again opened up about the abuse she received from her father. The 41-year-old has been very vocal in the recent past about the abuse she received from her father, especially during her early playing days.

Dokic made a controversial move in her career in 2001 when she decided to stop playing for Australia and instead started playing for then Yugoslavia. Shas recently spoken to the Carrie & Tommy radio show, as quoted by the English media outlet Daily Mail, where she talked about how she was forced by her father to take that decision.

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“I would take 100 years of abuse if I could take back not playing for Australia for a few years,” she said. “He took away from me, something that I loved so much. He took that away from me in that moment. He's sitting in a hotel room watching this while I'm getting booed by 15,000 people. I just wanted to kind of drop into the ground and disappear and never come back. I would take any abuse, anything in this world to not even just go through that personally, but that it didn't take my people, Australians and my fans and everyone that always cheered for me, that it didn't take 10 or 15 years until my book came out for them to know the truth and just how much I really love Australia.”

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Dokic retired from professional tennis in 2014. She went as high as fourth in the WTA Rankings and finished her career with six titles at the seniors level. However, she failed to win a single Grand Slam. Her best outing in a major event came at Wimbledon in 2020, when she was eventually knocked out after losing in the semifinal to the former world number one America’s Lindsay Davenport in straight sets with a score of 6-4, 6-2.