Beatriz Haddad Maia, or simply Bia Haddad, a tennis player who was compared to Russian Maria Sharapova in the beginning of her career because of her beauty, turned 19 obsessed with exercise: not just physical, but also mathematical.
“Taking care of my body is my nerd side. I wake up before the other girls, at 6 a.m, put a towel on the floor of my bedroom and start to stretch, to release, I do all the exercises for abdomen, hip, knee, ankle, shoulder, wrist. There are people who think I´m crazy. But I love it,” says Bia.
The other nerd side she is applying is in her academic career. The Brazilian tennis player has been attending on-line university since the beginning of the year studying business administration.
“If I didn’t play, I would be studying civil engineering or medicine. I love mathematics, physics. But with our careers it’s impossible,” she says.
“I need to exercise my mind off court. If it stays only on tennis, when you lose, you want to kill yourself,” she finishes.
With all the energy spent on the court or studying between matches, Bia goes to sleep around 9h30 p.m. “I get very sleepy, I shut off.”
On July 16 in Toronto she found another reason to stay awake: The 2015 Pan American Games, a competition she will play for the first time in her career. “I dream about playing the Olympics and the Pan Am Games. I grow up a lot playing for Brazil. I’ll meet a lot of new people, open my mind, learn and have fun”.
At 13 years old, Bia already captured attention on the Brazilian circuit playing against older girls. But it’s been in the last months that her career got back on track and she started grabbing attention outside of Brazil.
It’s not just the recently acquired driver license at a driving school that gets Bia excited.
This year, she won her first WTA title on doubles playing with Paula Gonçalves (who alongside Gabriela Cé are the Brazilian women’s tennis team at the Pan Am Games), in Bogotá, Colombia. Bia also made quarter-finals of the Rio Open and reached her career high singles WTA ranking of 148.
A revolution after some suffering which she sums up this way: “Two years ago, I was unlucky, I fell on court and hurt my right shoulder. After that, I had three herniated discs, my right leg was paralysed, I had back surgery, I was feeling so bad, I didn’t know if I was going back to play. In those six months, I became somebody else,” she recalls.
“We learn through love or pain,”says Bia.
The pain never returned after October 12 2012, the day she had the back surgery.
The love comes from family. Her mother, Laís Haddad is a tennis teacher, her father, Ayrton Maia Filho, was a basketball player.
From the Maia family, she inherited the height. Today, at 1,85m, only Sharapova in the top 10 of the WTA is taller than her .
“Being tall is beneficial. A lot of tennis players wanted to be tall and left-handed like myself,” she says.
“But Sharapova is not a player who I copy. Petra Kvitova, Serena Williams and Simona Halep are the players I look at to improve. From Sharapova, only the mental side. But I prefer just being myself, Bia”.
Bia Haddad has some of the best tennis professionals of Brazil on her team. In Balneario Camboriu, located in the Santa Catarina State, where she lives, she is coached by Larri Passos, former mentor of Gustavo Kuerten, who also travels with her.
Bia’s technical coach is Marcus Vinicius Barbosa, known as Bocão, a pupil of Passos. She has Gustavo Magliocca as her physiologist (who also works with Olympic swimming gold medalist César Cielo ), her psychologist is Carla di Perro (also Thomaz Bellucci’s), as well as a physiotherapist, a personal trainer, an orthopedist and an osteopath.
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