She is the teenage tennis sensation who is as much at home on the catwalk as she is on Wimbledon’s centre court.
At 17, Russian star Anna Kournikova looks like a supermodel and plays like a champion. And while she racks victory on top of victory, male fans fight for a touch of her discarded towels or hold up banners asking for her hand in marriage. The Lobbing Lolita has come a long way from the run-down Moscow apartment block where she grew up.
Nowadays home is a luxury apartment on Miami Beach, paid for with the estimated £4 million she has earned from tennis and from deals with sports equipment manufacturers. She has earned £6 million from tennis alone - and the going rate for an interview with the World Number 11 is not a penny less than £70,000. Yet thousands of miles away in her Russian homeland, her father Sergei watchers her career unfold from the sidelines. While she makes her fortune, he remains behind in Moscow earning around £35 a week as a teacher in the Russian Physical Culture Ministry. Speaking for the first time, the former wrestling champion told of his pride in his stunning daugher…and also his fears for her. In his high-rise apartment filled with mementoes, Sergei says: "Anna’s happiness is important to me, whether on court, in her modelling career - or in her personal relationships.
"One thing I wouldn’t want is for Anna to be surrounded by vain, shallow people, who are only attracted by her success."
It is seven months since his wife and daughter last visited him in Moscow. Instead Sergei joins them for major tournaments and holidays. But he believes the separation is a sacrifice worth making for his daughter’s career.
"I love my family," he says. "Each meeting is such a joy. Even though I continue with my job in Moscow, I frequently travel to different tournaments around the world where Anna is playing."She last came to Moscow in December last year. But since then I have visited my wife and daughter abroad three times.".
Like his stunning daughter, Sergei has the sun-kissed looks of the athlete he once was - although he admits that the last time he beat Anna at tennis was when she was seven years old. He prefers to say out of the limelight. "I’m not recognised in the pictures as her father yet - and I’d prefer it to continue that way," he says. "Her popularity and success doesn’t cause me any discomfort".
"Anna has found her spot in life and she’s happy. I’m very glad she’s now the focus of attention and enjoys her well earned popularity. My daughter’s success is the result of great effort and hard work. Anna is a very purposeful person and step by step she moved towards the dream."
Sergei was just 19 when his wife Alla gave birth to Anna, their first and only child on June 7, 1981. And it was her dad who first taught her to pick up a racquet at the age of four. Day after day, Anna would pound frayed balls on the potholed public court and in their tiny flat smashed balls around the kitchen breaking crockery. When the time came for Anna to use a proper racquet, Sergei sold the family’s portable TV to pay for it. By now Anna was hooked and after joining a children’s club at Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, she enrolled in the Moscow Spartak tennis school. It didn’t take long for her precocious talent to get noticed.
Soon sportswear manufacturers were falling over themselves to supply the cute little blonde with clothing. Then her life changed forever when a sports agent saw her play at the 1981 Kremlin Cup. Stunned, he immediately contacted Alla and Sergei, offering to make the cute nine-year-old the agency’s youngest every signing. Along with the offer of a place at the world-famous Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Florida and luxury apartment for Anna and her mother, he promised she would make her fortune. For most kids who didn’t speak a word of English, moving 3,000 miles to a new home would have been terrifying. Not Anna. She quickly established herself as top dog at the school where former pupils include Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras. At 12, she already had a firm belief in her own ability and bookies were giving her odds of ten to one to win Wimbledon before the year 2000.
"When Anna walked through the grounds of the Academy, other kids stepped aside," said one pupil.
"She hadn’t even hit adolescence, but she was already hard bitten enough to be a company chairman."
In the mornings, Anna studied. Afternoons were devoted to three-and-a hours of practice on one of more than 70 courts at the complex. Anna was not always popular with her fellow students. German tennis student Tommy Haas recalls: "She knew she was good-looking and good on court. "She was mostly stuck-up and treated people not so well. She knew she could get away with it."
By the time she was 14, she was the Number One Junior in the world and within weeks of her birthday, turned professional. But with Sergei in Moscow, her coach Nick now filled a role as a second father. "She was a dazzling little girl, bubbling with enthusiasm," he recalls. But as Anna’s belief in her own ability grew, Nick started to fear for her".
"She knew who she was - and wanted everyone to know who she was too," he says. "Anna was pampered, placed on a pedestal, hailed as the next Seles. As she entered her teens, she thought she was Queen Tut. She was rude and conceited.
"But she survived a couple of tough years and began to grow, off court and on.
"Her self-confidence is, to say the least, considerable. Anna knows everything and what she doesn’t know, she thinks she knows.
"She always said: "To be Number One has always been my dream and I will not let that go."
Now, on the opening day of Wimbledon, Kournikova’s dream of being number one - on and off the court - seems nearer than ever. She recently bought a million dollar home in Miami Beach, Florida which she shares where her mum, Alla. Off court, like any energetic 17-year-old, she likes to rollerblade and swim and she gives tennis coaching to children. Her other passions are the dolls she has collected from every country she has visited. But when it comes to interviews, there is little of the naïve teenager about her answers. Anna doesn’t just have attitude…she has Anna-tude. But she reserves her iciest glares for questions about her controversial relationship with ice hockey star, Sergei Federov, who is 11 years her senior. The 28-year-old former soviet national player dramatically defected from Russia eight years ago in a private jet. Now he earns more than £20 million a year as a star player for the Detroit Red Wings - but ask Anna if Sergei is her boyfriend and she snaps: "He wishes!"
Neither has Anna’s manner made her universally popular on the tennis circuit, where she has been accused of wearing out the mirror in the locker room. Top women’s player Lindsay Davenport says: "She is the type of girl who one day says ‘Hi’ and the next walks right by you. I just stopped saying ‘Hi.’ But it is Anna’s glamorous 34-year-old mother who pulls most of the strings in her daughters life. "Mama is head coach and always will be," says Nick Bollettieri. "You can’t fight Mama." Anna’s prize money goes straight to Alla, who consults her daughter on how to spend it. But she insists that her daughter’s success is a family enterprise.
"To become rich through my daughter was never my aim. I only wanted to maker a great sportswoman," she says.
"Anyway, Anna’s earnings have not yet matched what her family invested in her.
"I mean psychological investments - no one ever counts those."
But one thing Mrs Kournikova does not have to invest in is her little girls’ self confidence. Says Alla: "Anna’s favourite saying is: ‘I am beautiful, famous and gorgeous' "