Mumbai: Indian tennis star and six-time Grand Slam winner Sania Mirza is one of the most influential sports stars. On Tuesday, Sania Mirza dropped an Instagram reel video in which she opened up about the sexist remarks she faced while growing up as a girl who chose to play a sport.
Sania Mirza, who hails from Hyderabad, began playing tennis at the age of six and was trained by her father Imran Mirza.
In a video titled ‘Things you grow up hearing as a girl who decides to play a sport’, the tennis star opened up about the comments she faced. She used text captions to list out the questions she heard growing up like, “If you become so dark who will marry you?”, “How will you go for tournaments when you have to run a family?” and “Your sporting career ends as soon as you become a mother.”
Sharing the video she captioned, “I am done ✌🏽 peace out.”
Her video comes amidst the times when the society has created a clear demarcation of occupational roles for men and women. However, in her over two decades of career, Sania Mirza has only proven all these points to be untrue and proven the haters wrong.
Sania, who is married to Pakistan cricketer Shoaib Malik, became a mother to Izhaan in October of 2018. In 2019, she returned to the court for the first time after the birth of her son, Izhaan.
From 2003 until her retirement from singles in 2013, Mirza carried India’s No. 1 Tennis player tag given by the World Tennis Association.
Sania Mirza even found a spot on the 2016 Times magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in the world. She has been the recipient of 2004 Arjuna Award (the second-highest sporting honour in India).