Dinara Mubinovna Safina

Dinara Safina was born on April 27, 1986 in Moscow.

By nationality - Tatar, by religion - Muslim.

As Dinara admitted, as a child she dreamed of becoming a doctor. However, since the age of three, her parents brought her to the court where her older brother was training. Dinara recalled: "I was lucky: I still found a time when there was a friendly atmosphere in children's tennis. I perceived the girls around me not as competitors, but as girlfriends.

And after training, we didn't want to part: we sat down in a clearing, laid out sandwiches and fruits on the grass, which our parents gave us with them, and arranged joint lunches." I started playing tennis professionally from the age of seven. Immediately attracted the attention of specialists. Since the age of 12, she has lived and trained abroad - in Valencia, Spain. Already in 1999, she became one of the members of the national team in the ITF team trophy among fourteen-year-olds, as part of which she won the title of tournament champions.

Dinara Safina as a child with her parents and brother

Her favorite coatings are dirt and hard. Dinara Safina is an aggressive backline player who likes to attack with maximum force all the ascending balls that fall on her half of the court; Dinara also has a powerful first serve. Safina's weak side as a player is her moral stability - she lost a lot of matches at a high level, having failed to reconfigure herself to fight by unsuccessfully starting the match. At the peak of his career, these mental problems were not so strong.

The peak of Safina's results came in the second half of the summer of 2003: she won the tournament in Palermo (beating Katarina Srebotnik in the final), and then made it to the fourth round at the Grand Slam tournament for the first time - at the US Open. The pair year brought the first final at the association competitions: in Canberra, as well as a debut at the Grand Slam tournaments - at the French tournament of the series.

In 2004, the results continued their qualitative growth: in singles, Dinara rose a dozen positions, becoming a little more effective playing with tennis players from the Top-20. In a pair, collaborating with many partners, the Russian woman entered the Top-100 for the first time, and by the end of the season she made her way into the Top-30.

In 2009, she reached the finals at major tournaments twice - in Sydney and at the Australian Open. She reached the final in Stuttgart and won a bunch of tournaments of the highest category of the regular tour in Madrid and Rome. Having reached the final of Roland Garros, Safina could not cope with Svetlana Kuznetsova there. In 2009, she was the first racket of the world for some time, although by the end of the year she became the 2nd - Serena Williams was able to beat her. In 2010, her health problems worsened. Safina has noticeably lost her former positions in the ranking, falling back into the seventh decade of the classification. At the Grand Slam tournaments, she won only three matches that season, and all of them fell at the season-opening Australian Open. Back problems forced her to repeatedly take breaks in the tournament schedule, depriving her of the opportunity to play the February-March hard series and Wimbledon.

In May 2014, she officially announced the end of her professional career. Her career prize money was $10,585,640.

Dinara and Marat

Dinara Safina finished her professional career very early: injuries forced her to leave the court. "I could have played longer, but I don't regret it. What's done is done. I spared no effort to train, I did everything in my power," she said. After completing her playing career, Dinara appeared on the airwaves of the Russian-language version of the Eurosport channels for some time, commenting on tennis matches as an invited expert. She received a law degree from the Moscow Institute of Public Administration and Law. Since August 2016, he has been living in New York. Since December 2016, she has become a coach at the MatchPoint NYC Tennis Center, located in downtown Brooklyn. She coached the finalist of the 2014 US Open in the junior category, Ukrainian Angelina Kalinina. "I just said to myself: if there is something you can do in New York, you should decide to do it. Nothing held me back," Safina said about moving to the United States.