Gabriela Sabatini, Novak Djokovic and Simona Halep honoured at ITF’s World Champions Dinner

The ITF’s greatest honor, the Philippe Chatrier Award, was given to Gabriela Sabatini at the 2019 ITF World Champions Dinner in Paris on Tuesday. Sabatini won the US Open in 1990 and made it to the semifinals of the French Open five times.
Sabatini had a great career. She won the Wimbledon doubles title in 1988 and the Olympic silver medal in singles tennis that same year. She was admitted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2006. She retired in 1996 with 27 singles titles and 14 doubles wins. At the peak of her career, she was ranked No. 3 in the world in singles.

Sabatini has continued to help tennis and gives a lot of time to working with UNICEF, UNESCO, the Special Olympics, and as a Athlete Role Model at the 2018 Buenos Aires Youth Olympic Games to promote tennis and help kids around the world.

What she said:

“It’s very important to me to be here at Roland Garros.” It was here that I won my first big event—the junior title when I was 14 years old. This title was important to me in my life and in sports. I wasn’t old enough to understand what was going on at that time. When I found out I was going to play tennis, I was just happy. I ended up winning Roland Garros and becoming the best youth player in the world.

“During my career, I had hard times. I traveled around the world by myself, dealt with different kinds of stress, and missed my home country of Argentina and my friends.” At that age, I wasn’t like other girls my age. But all that work paid off in the end. Tennis helped me fly; it made me stronger mentally and physically.

It was good to win, but losing taught me more. Even though it’s been more than 20 years since I quit tennis, it will always be a part of my life.

Novak Djokovic and Simona Halep were among the 2018 role of honorees. So were Mike Bryan and Jack Sock, Barbora Krejcikova and Katerina Siniakova, Tseng Chun Hsin and Clara Burel, and Shingo Kunieda, Diede de Groot, and Dylan Alcott, who were wheelchair champions.

Halep said:

I’m so glad all my hard work paid off because I’m so happy to be here tonight. I couldn’t say no to this, even though I have a game tomorrow. It’s important to me, and I’ll keep it with my Grand Slam, No. 1 prize, and this one.

This is what Djokovic said:

ITF, thank you very much for this great award. This has been a great season for me to come back. I had surgery on my arm to start it all, and it took a few months to heal, get back on track, and find the game that would give me three Grand Slam titles in what was probably the best six months of my career. I hope to keep that streak going here in Paris.

There were also awards for Croatia and the Czech Republic, which won the Davis Cup and Fed Cup, respectively.