Jelena Dokic reveals why she blocked abusive father

• Jelena Dokic is a phenomenal sight at the Australian Open 2024
• She has turned around her life from some very unpleasant circumstances
• Dokic is a former world No 4 and a quarter-finalist of the French Open and Australian Open respectively

Jelena Dokic is a phenomenal sight at the Australian Open 2024 and she is here for more than on-court tennis interviews.

She has turned around her life from some very unpleasant circumstances despite her stellar tennis career for over a decade.

Dokic is a former world No 4 and a quarter-finalist of the French Open and Australian Open respectively. Unfortunately, this record did not stop her from battling some harsh realities of the world.

Jelena Dokic Weight Loss Battle

The retired tennis player, who was born in the former Yugoslavia, has travelled a long and frequently difficult path over the past 20 years. She eventually settled in Australia.

Dokic is now a popular figure at Rod Laver Arena due to her engaging on-court interviews with all-cadre players.  One of the many topics she explores is cyberbullying on tennis players.

She bore the brunt of online attacks for years due to weight gain and she struggled to shed the extra pounds. Most of her bullies always attacked her in the comment section of her posts which detailed her journey with losing weight.

“I have always been honest with you all about my struggles and my weight battles. I have talked about my weight and not a lot of people have done that publicly,” she detailed on her Instagram in 2020.

Australian-based tennis star Jelena Dokic. Photo/Women’s Health Australia

She candidly told bullies to let her be stating that they should never be bothered by her physical appearance and end the negativity.

“Now I am also going to be honest but I also feel like I need to address the negative attention around what people think I should look like. And here is my message to you, get over it. Leave me and my physical appearance alone.”

The retired tennis star urged those who always post negatively about other people’s physical appearance to rethink about their lives.

She felt that women are targeted more than men yet they choose not to understand the struggle one goes through to lose weight.

Drawing back to the Covid-19 lockdown in Australia in 2020, Dokic said the reality of weight loss put her on a mental warpath that not so many people understood.

Weight gain amid the pandemic and nasty comments taught her a lesson that not everyone is kind. They focus on the things that don’t matter while there is a lot of great things that they can focus on.

“Instead of talking about my weight, why don’t you talk about all my accomplishments? Does my weight determine my worth? It’s so easy to judge others but why can’t people just be kind? We should be talking about inner beauty and not the shallow outside looks,” she narrated.

Jelena Dokic Opens Up About Bumpy Childhood

Former Australian tennis player Jelena Dokic. Photo/San Diego UNion Tribune

In an interview with The Age, Dokic revealed more about her background. She mentioned how her father Damir Dokic, who was her tennis coach for the entirety of her career, had a terrifying presence throughout her early years.

Damir made her life difficult through physical abuse regardless of the outcome of every game she played in. Her childhood and teenage years gave her a lifelong trauma.

“Even if I won, I would still at times be beaten and abused. I had some very difficult moments where I was beaten and kicked and punched to the point of being unconscious,” she recalls adding she cut off communication with her father.

Her trolls only added to the pain of growing up in a home where she was not allowed to express herself.

“I was silenced for my whole life. From the very first day that I started playing tennis, the No.1 rule was ‘Never tell anyone anything, or there will be massive, massive consequences’… I was someone that couldn’t look people in the eye. I couldn’t string two sentences together. Now I clearly can’t shut up.”

She is now at a happy place mentally and physically but it hasn’t been an easy ride for her.