Source : the age
Unbreakable: The Jelena Dokic Story ★★★★
Wednesday (January 29), Nine, 9pm
Professional sportspeople are, pretty much by definition, extraordinary. Blessed with physical traits most of us can only dream of having, to reach the top, they ally their natural gifts with mental fortitude and single-minded determination that at times surpass all reason, to achieve their goals.
They work and sacrifice and drive themselves to extremes of mind and body far beyond your regular mortal’s experience. For good or ill, they are not normal.
Dokic grew up in extreme poverty, her family coming to Australia from Serbia as refugees. Credit: Nine
Tennis players exist in a rarefied space even by professional sports standards. Standing alone in battle, eschewing the bonding and camaraderie of team sports, they travel the world in bubbles, isolated from ordinary life. Their talents are identified from a young age, and they are put into a system which hones them for high performance and demands from them total commitment, often urged forward by families for whom the youngster’s success could mean the answer to all their prayers – a dynamic that can so easily warp into the sport’s notorious trope of the tyrannical parent.
Jelena Dokic is an exemplar of all of these elements of the professional tennis player. Born in the former Yugoslavia, Dokic grew up in extreme poverty, her family coming to Australia from Serbia as refugees. As a little girl she was earmarked for greatness, but she didn’t just carry the hope for sporting success: on her young shoulders was placed the responsibility for gaining a better life for her entire family. Her father, Damir, took the job of coaching his daughter and drove her relentlessly. As we know now – and as Unbreakable, this moving documentary, makes distressingly clear – he was brutal. And yet for many years, the young woman defended her father and refused to admit that the abuse was going on, silenced by the terror of retribution from Damir, whose grip over his daughter was total.
Dokic’s tennis career hit incredible highs: she blew world No.1 Martina Hingis off the court in the first round at Wimbledon in 1999. Dokic was 16 years old and ranked 129 in the world, but that victory rocketed her into the public eye. She quickly became the darling of the tennis world, hailed as the next big thing in Australia, her adopted country taking her to its heart in the way it always does for anyone who shows signs of bringing national glory on the sporting field. She made grand slam semi-finals, flew up the rankings and looked set to bestride the earth. At her peak, Dokic was ranked No.4 in the world.
This documentary is the story of Dokic’s rise and the subsequent fall, but more than anything the story of a woman who rebuilt herself with astonishing courage and resilience. A wonderful array of archival footage of Dokic on court – a potent reminder of just how good she was, good enough to mix it with the likes of Williams, Davenport and Hingis at their best – combines with interviews with an impressive line-up of tennis greats and commentators as well as Dokic herself. She is candid, articulate and quite inspirational in her ability to relate her own story, as it is, and as difficult as it surely must have been to relive the worst times of her life on camera.
Dokic during her playing years with legend of the game Roger Federer. Credit: Nine
Jelena Dokic has long been a cautionary tale: she is not the only tennis player to have suffered abuse from a coach or family member, but the years of mistreatment at her father’s hands is one of the most harrowing examples of the big problem the sport hid from the public for many years. But as Unbreakable shows, it’s much more than a cautionary tale: it’s the tale of an incredible woman, who survived the very worst, came through the other side, and emerged stronger, in control of her own narrative, and now making use of her experience to help others.
Professional sportspeople are extraordinary, but it could be the most extraordinary of all is not the biggest winner, but the one who passes through the fire and afterward is still standing, still speaking and still refusing to be broken.
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