Despite losing the Wimbledon title, Anas Jaber “Fakhr Al Arab”

London (AFP)

Anas Jaber trained on hotel courts during her childhood, and then with the boys, before breaking down barriers and standing a step away on Saturday at Wimbledon, from the title of the first major tennis tournament, a former waste of Arab and African players.
Jaber is the first Arab player to appear in the quarter-finals of a major tournament in Australia 2020, the first Arab woman to win a professional tournament in Birmingham 2021, the first Arab among the top ten in the world rankings, and the first to win the title of one of the thousand tournaments in Madrid last May.
In 2022, she achieved a new achievement by reaching the Wimbledon final, as she beat Kazakhstan’s Elena Rybakina 6-3 before losing the second and third sets 2-6 and 2-6.
The world number two climbed to the top quickly in two years, and remains proud of Tunisia, her country and her country of origin (where she trained between three and sixteen or seventeen).
In its initiative, during the month of July 2021, it sold its strikers at an auction to purchase medical equipment and help hospitals in her country, which witnessed a “tsunami” wave of the “Covid-19” pandemic.
Jaber announced at the start of Wimbledon that the company that sponsors it decided to allocate a sum of 100 euros for each fallen ball that it succeeds in repaying, to restore and rehabilitate schools and institutes in marginalized provinces in northwestern Tunisia.
She’s known for being daring and tough in play and she doesn’t hesitate to stop and ask a fan to keep quiet so she can focus.
The sportswear company “Loto” designed its own T-shirt, which read “Yalla Habibi”, indicating that the player “is an inspiration to others.”
Anas Jaber seems cheerful and always seeks to comment in her own way, as she has the audacity to ask to listen to Tunisian rhythms and songs, after every match she won during the Berlin tournament, which she won her title last month. And the person responsible for the activation in the stadium interacted with her, and specially broadcast for her a clip from a song by the Tunisian rap artist “Balti”.
She is very active on social networking sites, and publishes videos and photos of part of her private family life, with her husband, the physiotherapist Karim Kammoun, as well as her celebration of her victories after each session.
Anas, or “the Minister of Happiness” as Tunisians call her, was born in the coastal city of Kasr Hilal, on August 28, 1994, into a family consisting of two young men and two girls, the youngest of them.
The beginning of Anas was in the coastal governorate of Sousse, in the east of the country, in stadiums on the property of hotels in the tourist area, then I moved to the “Hammam Sousse Club” stadium in the same governorate. “I started in a small club in my town in Monastir, then we moved to Hammam Sousse (east). I played There are in hotels because there are no tennis clubs.”
She added Jaber, who started her first steps in the tennis promotion center at school with her coach at the time, Nabil Malika.
Her coach, Malika, who accompanied her for ten years, discovered a unique talent with a personality “trying to be the best” over the rest of her fellow girls and boys as well.
Malika, who accompanied her until her thirteenth birthday, explains: She had great control over the ball, so that other coaches tried to attract her to handball, and Anas really thought seriously about changing her specialty, but stuck to her stay in tennis.
Her former colleague Omar Al-Obeidi says in front of a tennis court bearing her name in her honor at Hammam Sousse Club, where the champion grabbed the racket for the first time: “I remember we used to call her Roger Federer,” after the Swiss tennis legend.
Gaber’s first international success was in the Women’s Championship at Roland Garros, when she won the title, where “I crowned in 2011 Roland Garros Junior Women at the age of sixteen, but I struggled a lot to move from the women’s category to the professional tournaments.
Jaber is a lover of football and of the Tunisian club Etoile du Sahel and Real Madrid of Spain, and her former French coach Bertrand Perret said about her in 2020: If she could replace tennis exercises with football, she would be the happiest.
She revealed Friday in a column for the British network, “BBC”, that winning Wimbledon was not her dream, saying: I will not lie to you, winning Wimbledon was not my childhood dream. My dream has always been to win the French Open on dirt at Roland Garros.
She is 1.67 m tall and rests on her right hand. She has been married since 2015 to the former fencing player and her current physical trainer, Karim Kammoun, and trained by the former player, Issam Jalali.