How Anna Kournikova stepped away from fame as she gives birth

Former tennis superstar Anna Kournikova gave birth to her fourth child with husband Enrique Iglesias last week, almost 25 years after they started dating.  

But despite once being one of the most photographed women in the world, Anna, 44, has lived a largely reclusive life since retiring at the tender age of 21.

The rarely-seen ex-sports star and model lives in a Miami mansion, which boasts a 16ft wall to keep out any unwanted eyes, with Spanish singer-songwriter Enrique and their three children, twins Lucy and Nicholas, seven, and daughter Mary, five. 

The couple, who met on the set of the hitmaker's music video for his 2001 single Escape, have kept a very low profile in recent years.

But Anna took to Instagram in a rare post on Monday as she announced she and Enrique had welcomed their fourth child together.

In a heartwarming social media reveal, Anna shared a photograph of the newborn sleeping in a hospital bassinet alongside a plush sloth toy. 

She kept her announcement simple and sweet, captioning the image 'My Sunshine' followed by the date '12.17.2025.' 

The couple, who have been together for over two decades, are known for being fiercely private about their personal lives. 

While Enrique, 50, has been performing to his adoring fans on tour, tennis fans are only granted rare glimpses of Anna.

At the height of her fame, Anna was a magnet for both the paparazzi and ignorant jibes about the perceived disparity between her looks and her talent.

The pictures that surfaced of Anna using a wheelchair said more about the former tennis star than a thousand glossy photo shoots ever could.

They offered a poignant reminder of the injury struggles that forced Anna, who reached the Wimbledon semi-finals in 1997 and achieved a career-high ranking of No 8 in the world, to call time on her career aged 21. 

The first photos of Anna to emerge in more than two years, which showed her wearing an orthopaedic boot while accompanied by her two young daughters, also told the story of a woman whose life has undergone a sea of change in the years since she departed the sporting stage.

The snaps are a portrait of the once teenage prodigy as a mother, and also, by virtue of their very rarity, a nod to the more private, family-centred life the reclusive Russian has enjoyed in the years since the flashbulbs faded.

Anna's personal life, once the focus of endless media speculation to the point where she famously told Sports Illustrated, 'Every country I visit, I have a different boyfriend and I kiss them all', has long since ceased to be the subject of tabloid tittle-tattle.

The Russian has been in a relationship with the Spanish singer since 2001, although the couple's marital status remains an enduring mystery. 'We haven’t gotten married in public, but that doesn’t mean we are not married,' he remarked cryptically two years ago. 

Anna's desire for privacy, evident in the 16ft walls that surround the family's home, is not merely a reaction to an early life lived in front of the global gaze. 

In 2005, two years after her retirement, she was targeted by a stalker, William Lepeska, who swam naked across Biscayne Bay towards her house in the hope that she would save him from drowning.

In the event, Lepeska, who was issued with a permanent restraining order requiring him to stay at least 1,000 ft away from Kournikova, swam to the wrong house. 

'I was absolutely shocked and fearful and I was very much concerned for my safety,' said Kournikova, who hired bodyguards and ramped up security at her home following the incident. 

'It was very frightening and scary, just knowing there is someone out there who's obsessive.'

Given the questionable manner in which she was portrayed during her teenage years - even Sports Illustrated dubbed her a 'teen sexpot' at the age of 16 - there was a depressing sense of inevitability about the incident. 

By the time she was voted the Sexiest Woman in the World by the men's lifestyle magazine FHM in 2002, Anna had already acquired notoriety by featuring in a sports bra ad that featured the tagline: 'Only the ball should bounce.' 

She even inspired a computer virus, with an email attachment purporting to bear her image spreading like wildfire in early 2001, famously earning her a mention in the penultimate season of Friends the following year. 

Yet the woeful manner in which she was portrayed did not prevent Anna from becoming the world's highest-paid female athlete, and nor did it stop her from compiling a record that would be the envy of most players.

In addition to a top-ten ranking and a Grand Slam semi-final, Anna twice won the Australian Open women's doubles alongside fellow prodigy Martina Hingis, and was a fixture in the latter stages of Grand Slam doubles events in the late 90s and early noughties.

A quarter-finalist or better in women's and mixed doubles at each of the four Grand Slams, she contested finals at the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open and attained the world No 1 ranking in doubles in 1999.

Barely less significant was her influence on the generation of Russian players that followed her. Within a year of her retirement, Maria Sharapova, Svetlana Kuznetsova and Anastasia Myskina had all won Grand Slam titles, and Russian players have been a fixture at the top end of the sport ever since.

Kuznetsova, a French and US Open champion and former world No 2, has no illusions about the extent of Kournikova's influence, insisting that her compatriot was responsible for putting Russian tennis on the map.

'She brought really big popularity to Russian tennis, women's tennis,' Kuznetsova said in 2017. 'Everyone after her was just after her. 

'I always defend her when they say, "Oh, she never won a tournament." So what? She was a top-ten player. It's not just about winning tournaments. She was a great image for the game, not only for Russia but for tennis all over the world.

'Everybody was saying she never won a tournament. I'm like, OK, have you been to top 10? Have you ever held a racquet? I'm always surprised people give these opinions without achieving anything in their life. 

'I think she was great.'

While not all would go so far, Kournikova's sporting and cultural significance is inestimably greater than many have suggested.