Tennis great Martina Navratilova said she is cancer-free nearly four months after announcing she had been diagnosed with throat and breast cancer.
The former world No. 1, who won a total of 59 Grand Slam titles across singles and doubles and is considered among one the greatest players of all time, had said in January that the cancer was in Stage 1.
“As far as they know I’m cancer-free,” the 66-year-old told Piers Morgan for TalkTV in an excerpt of an interview to be released later on Tuesday.
“I still need to do the right breast probably with radiation but only for a couple of weeks and that’s more preventative than anything else.”
During the interview with Morgan, according to The Sun newspaper in London, Navratilova said when she was diagnosed, “I was in a total panic for three days, thinking I may not see next Christmas” and came up with a bucket list of things she wanted to do.
She noticed an enlarged lymph node in her neck while attending the season-ending WTA Finals in Fort Worth, Texas, in November, and a biopsy showed early stage throat cancer. While Navratilova was undergoing tests on her throat, she said, the unrelated, early stage breast cancer was discovered.
Navratilova was diagnosed with a noninvasive form of breast cancer in 2010 and had a lumpectomy.
She won 31 Grand Slam titles in women’s doubles and 10 in mixed doubles. The last was a mixed doubles championship with Bob Bryan at the 2006 U.S. Open, a month shy of her 50th birthday.
Navratilova originally retired in 1994, after a record 167 singles titles and 331 weeks at No. 1 in the WTA rankings. She returned to the tour to play doubles in 2000 and occasionally competed in singles, too.
She has worked as a TV analyst in recent years.
