Vondrushova gets a divorce and leaves her husband a cat

When Marketa Vondrushova was paving the way to triumph at Wimbledon last year, her husband Stepan Simek was sitting at home in Prague and looking after the cat. Only when the Czech reached the final did they hire a “babysitter” to look after her and he was able to come to London.

Ten months later, her husband is no longer in her life, and neither is her cat. They are getting divorced and the pet went to him.

They met at a tournament in 2016, because Simek was also a tennis player. Injuries forced him to replace the racket with a computer, and the relationship was celebrated with an engagement after she won the silver Olympic medal in Tokyo 2021, only to stand at the altar a year later.

– The last weeks of my life have not been happy at all. We broke up and he took the cat away – revealed the Wimbledon champion. – It just didn’t work out for us, so we agreed that it’s best not to be together anymore. We have agreed on everything, all that remains is the formalization of the divorce.

However, it was not always like that. After the triumph in London, Vondrushova said that her husband, although he was not there, had a decisive influence.

– During the break due to rain in the quarterfinals, I lost in the third set to Jessica Pegula with 3:1. The coach was not with me and I was talking to Simek the whole time. He motivated me to turn around.

That her life has really not been easy in recent months, she explained in the same interview with a Czech newspaper:

– After Indian Wells, my grandfather died, without whom I would not have achieved anything in tennis. He was always there for me at the beginning of my career. In America, I found out that the disease had worsened, I returned home and saw him once more. A few days later he died of cancer.

Vondrush’s triumph at Wimbledon was a big sensation even though she has already made two major finals, at Roland Garros in 2019 and at the Tokyo Olympics. The Czech is 24 years old, she is ranked seventh in the world, but she has not done anything important since that London feat. No title, not even a final. She played her only semi-final last week in Stuttgart.

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