Meet the former tennis star who’s now a lingerie model…
Camila Giorgi has been accused of many things over the years. Predictability has never been one of them.
The 33-year-old Italian, a former tennis player who reached a career-high ranking of No 26 in the world in 2018 before retiring last May, has a history of doing things her own way.
Take Giorgi’s 2021 season, which began with her posting a series of lingerie photos to her Instagram account. It was a move that occasioned much chatter in tennis circles. Had Giorgi taken her eye off the ball? Was she perhaps lining up a new career as a model?
Giorgi’s eloquent riposte came later that year, when she defeated Karolina Pliskova, a former world No 1 who had reached the Wimbledon final the previous month, to win the Canadian Open, one of the biggest events outside the grand slams.
It was the most significant victory of her career and it seemed to mark a potential turning point, with Giorgi tempering her hell-for-leather playing style to deliver a performance of controlled aggression. But not even the long-awaited capture of a title commensurate with her talent seemed to alter Giorgi’s stated preference for fashion over tennis.
‘I like sports a lot, but I like fashion more,’ said Giorgi, whose mother Claudia Fullone is a designer. ‘[It’s] an obsession that has been passed on to me since I was a child.’
Notably, though, Giorgi was also careful to emphasise in the same interview that her revealing social media posts were taken during some rare moments of downtime in an otherwise gruelling off-season. It inevitably begged questions. How did Giorgi see herself – and how did she wish to be seen? High-flying athlete? Dedicated fashionista? A little of both?
It is just one example of the contradictory nature of a player whose talent for wrongfooting opponents on the court was matched by her ability to catch observers cold off it.
Another came this week, when Giorgi popped up at the Argentina Open, a men’s event in Buenos Aires, in a newfound reporting role.
As footage surfaced on her Instagram account of Giorgi interviewing the Argentinian players Sebastian Baez and Guido Pella, there was a palpable sense of surprise in many quarters.
Outside her social media activity – including a Christmas Eve desert-making masterclass, clad in a red satin dress, that has been viewed more than a million times – Giorgi has barely been seen since she retired without fanfare last year amid accusations of tax evasion and unpaid rent in her native Italy.
It was a curious business, with the owner of a villa Giorgi and her family had been renting in Calenzano, a town on the outskirts of Florence, claiming she had unexpectedly upped sticks with six months’ rent outstanding and removed valuable items of furniture from the property.
Giorgi denied the accusations during an appearance on the Italian chat show Verissimo last October, describing the claims as laughable.
‘The house had no furniture and we always paid the rent,’ she said. ‘The news made me laugh.
Giorgi also poured cold water on suggestions that she had ‘fled’ to the US – ‘It was not an escape,’ she insisted, ‘I moved to America permanently with my parents’ – and said her retirement simply coincided with the conclusion of an investigation by the Guardia di Finanza, an Italian law enforcement agency that deals with financial crime.
She claimed that alleged gaps in her tax returns were down to a lawyer with whom she no longer had dealings.
‘The problems with the tax authorities? My family did not know about them, said Giorgi. ‘They were created by outside people who managed me.’
It is said that perception is nine-tenths of the law, and the abrupt nature of Giorgi’s departure from the game undoubtedly did little to burnish her public image. Even the WTA, the governing body of the women’s game, struggled to corroborate claims of her retirement after her name appeared on the International Tennis Integrity Agency’s list of retired players.
But there too Giorgi mounted a robust defence, explaining that she left the sport because she was exhausted and simply ‘couldn’t travel any more’. She also said a planned retirement announcement had been blown out of the water by the publication of the ITIA list.
It all made for an eventful conclusion to a tennis career that began when Giorgi, who has two brothers, Leandro and Amadeus – Antonela, her younger sister, died tragically in a car accident in Paris in 2011 – first picked up a racket as a five-year-old.
For long-time followers of her career, however, the commotion that accompanied Giorgi’s departure from the sport was merely so much water off a duck’s back. If brows were furrowed every time the Italian made an unforeseen move over the years, the Botox bills would have been incalculable.
Quirks and controversies have long been Giorgi’s calling card from the very beginning, when private sponsors who claimed they had invested in her potential on the understanding they would be repaid through her future earnings aired their grievances in an article published by Sports Illustrated.