Marcos Baghdatis - Personal Life

Personal Life

Marcos Baghdatis is the son of a Lebanese father, Christos, who migrated to Cyprus and a Cypriot mother.

Baghdatis began playing tennis at age five with his father and brothers. He enjoys playing and watching football and is a supporter of Apollon Limassol in Cyprus. He trained at the Mouratoglou Tennis Academy in Paris on an Olympic Solidarity Youth Development Programme Scholarship since the age of 13 and learned to speak French.

On January 28, 2006, Baghdatis received an exemption from the otherwise mandatory Cypriot national service so that he could concentrate instead on playing tennis.

He received the 2005 Cyprus Male Athlete of the Year award.

On July 14, 2012 Baghdatis married former Croatian tennis player Karolina Šprem. The couple welcomed their first child, a daughter called Zahara, on 20 October 2012.

Read more about this topic:  Marcos Baghdatis

Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:

    “Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
    —George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    “Nominee. A modest gentleman shrinking from the distinction of private life and diligently seeking the honorable obscurity of public office.”
    —Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)