“I want to thank one more person who never actually watches my matches, but is the most important person in my tennis life and my life in general,” he said, not naming his mother.
“When your four-year-old son is diagnosed with diabetes and the doctors in the office tell you that life and sports are going to be very, very limited for that child, it takes a very, very strong mother to walk out of that office and say, ‘My son will have whatever he wants,'” she said, pausing twice.
Zverev had type 1 diabetes since he was four years old. Alexander Zverev injected insulin twice on the way to defeating Ben Shelton.
“If he wants to be a tennis player, he will be a tennis player. If he wants to do something else, he will do something else. But this disease won’t define us, and I’m glad we worked through it and are doing what we’re doing right now.”
My mom is the most important and strongest person I know, because it takes an incredibly strong woman to do what she did.
He finished it there. “My mother is the most important and strongest person I know because it takes an incredibly strong woman to do what she did. So thanks to him too.”
Irina Zvereva was a professional player with a one-handed backhand in her own right, and she was her younger son’s head coach until he was 13 or 14, while Alexander Zverev Sr. traveled with Mischa. “I think I have pretty good technique, which is what my mom did when she was young, so I give her credit for that. My backhand in particular is 100 percent on my mom.” He has spoken publicly about his diagnosis of type 1 diabetes, which he received at the age of four, calling the early years “very, very difficult to control”.
Despite the real emotion it contains and the authenticity of the journey it describes, this part of the speech is hard to separate from Zverev’s public image, damaged by the testimony and legal action of two women accusing him of domestic violence. Olga Sharipova made her allegations public in 2020. Brenda Patea, the mother of his daughter, brought his work to Berlin, where it was completed in June 2024. Zverev denied both accounts.
That past came back to haunt him at Roland Garros in June 2026 when he finished the interview. The team because the journalist asked him a question.
The rest of his thanks to the family went to the people there. “We went thirty years without winning a Grand Slam title and now we’ve won two in three months,” he told his team. “I think God saw how hard we worked, how much we suffered, how much pain we went through. I think 2026 is the result of all the previous years.”