Russian tennis player Elena Dementieva

Russian professional tennis player Elena Dementieva was born in 1981 in Moscow. Elena played and won her first international tournament, Les Petits As, in France at the age of 13. In 1997, she entered the WTA top 500. Elena Dementieva turned professional in 1998 and entered the top 100 in 1999.

Elena won the silver in women’s singles at the 2000 Sydney Olympics as an 18-year-old and the gold at the Beijing Games in 2008. Dementieva achieved a career-high ranking of World No. 3, which was accomplished on 6 April 2009. Beautiful Russian tennis player announced her retirement on 29 October 2010, after her final match at the 2010 WTA Tour Championships. Dementieva ended her career ranked World No. 9.

Elena has made two Slam finals and six other semifinals in her career. She has made the semifinals of the U.S. Open three other times (2000, 2005, 2008) and been a semifinalist at the Australian Open once (2009) and at Wimbledon twice (2008, 2009). In the 2009 Wimbledon semifinals, considered the finest match of the ladies’ tournament that year, Dementieva had a match point against eventual champion Serena Williams before falling. (The match was the longest women’s Wimbledon semifinal in the Open Era.) Dementieva achieved a career-high ranking of World No. 3, which was accomplished on 6 April 2009. She announced her retirement on 29 October 2010, after her final match at the 2010 WTA Tour Championships. Dementieva ended her career ranked World No. 9.

Elena Dementieva has homes in Monaco, Moscow and Boca Raton, Florida. Dementieva enjoys snowboarding, reading, baseball and traveling. On 16 July 2011, Dementieva married hockey player of hockey club “Vityaz” Maxim Afinogenov in Moscow. The couple became parents of two children (2014, 2016). The second child was born when Elena was 34 years old. Afinogenov and Dementieva did not make a secret of this event and to share the news publicly. The girl was born just for Easter – April 20th. Newborn girl was named Veronica. Message of congratulation appeared on the site of the hockey club “Vityaz”, where 36-year-old Afinogenov plays.

Dementieva and Afinogenov officially registered their marriage July 16, 2011. Prior to that, Max and Elena met for a long time – since the mid-2000s.

“It just so happened that our parents really met first. There was a hockey game in Miami, and their places in the stadium were close. They got to talking, “Oh, you have a daughter athlete? And we have the son of a hockey player, born in 1979. Let’s meet on the dacha together?”

When we came home, my mother showed me a photograph of Maxim and asked if I wanted to meet him. But I firmly replied: “No!” I’m not attracted to the sport-shift. It seemed to me to be much more interesting if my boyfriend would be from some other sphere. And then I realized that no one will understand me well, no one will have the emotional closeness, as a person who went through the same tests, “- said in an interview about her husband the beautiful tennis player.

Russian tennis player Elena Dementieva