Roger Federer, who brought back the romance of tennis with his artistry and made many of us fall in love with the sport again, found the love of his life at Sydney in 2000.
Federer and Miroslava (Mirka) Vavrinec were members of the Switzerland team. While an unseeded Federer lost in three sets in the men’s singles bronze medal match, Mirka suffered defeat in the opening round of the women’s doubles.
The bitterness of those losses was washed away by their romance that blossomed in the Olympic Village. “We kissed for the first time in Sydney,” Federer would reveal later.
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The Federers have company with a few other Olympians, more decorated than them, becoming a couple.
‘Miss Perfect 10’ Nadia Comaneci of Romania clinched nine medals during her Olympic journey that made her the most famous gymnast of all time. Her Mr. Perfect, Bart Connor of the United States, has two golds.
They had met, as teenagers, for the first time shortly before the Montreal Olympics, where Comaneci would make history by scoring a perfect 10. They had even kissed, at the request of a photographer, after their triumph at the American Cup in New York. Comaneci, who had retired before the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, attended it nevertheless. Connor won both his medals at those Games.
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Theirs wasn’t the first marriage between an American and European Olympian. At the 1956 Olympics, hammer thrower Hal Connolly met Czechoslovakian discus thrower Olga Fikotova. After striking gold at Melbourne, they married a year later in Prague, watched by 40,000 people.
Nikolai Andrianov and Lyubov Burda achieved even more success as an Olympic couple. He remains the most decorated male gymnast with 15 medals, while she won a gold each in Mexico and Munich. They married in 1973, after the Munich Olympics.
The other couples who were struck by Cupid during the Olympics include swimmer Anita Lonsbrough and cyclist Hugh Porter, who met in Tokyo in 1964, and shooters Katerina Kurkova and Matthew Emmons, who found each other at Athens in 2004.
And, there is a tale that did not develop into a love story. The backdrop was the 1960 Olympics in Rome. It featured the boxing light heavyweight gold medallist and the fastest woman of that Olympics.
Cassius Clay, who would become Muhammad ‘The Greatest’ Ali had a big crush on sprinter Wilma Rudolph. But, he would disclose decades later, he was too shy to tell her.