Former US tennis player Chris Evert (68) has won her battle with ovarian cancer. The ex-athlete announced in a health update that she was cured about a year after her diagnosis was made public. There is a very high chance that ovarian cancer will never come back to her.

A year ago, Evert, who led the world rankings for a long time before retiring from playing in 1989, embarked on a journey "to protect myself and my loved ones from the risks of BRCA-related ovarian cancer, which took the life of my sister Jeanne ", Evert writes in a post on the website of sports broadcaster ESPN. Jeanne Evert (1957-2020), also a well-known tennis player, died in February 2020 after "the last two years of her life had been brutal".

Fortunately, Chris Evert was diagnosed with ovarian cancer early enough. A doctor told her that a few months later she would probably have had only a few options. Instead, she started "six rounds of chemotherapy" immediately after the diagnosis, as the 68-year-old explains. "Today I am cancer free and there is a 90 percent chance that ovarian cancer will never come back," writes Evert.

At the beginning of December, a year after a hysterectomy, a removal of the uterus, Evert also had a double mastectomy, a partial or complete removal of the mammary gland. This also reduced the chance of developing breast cancer for the former athlete by more than 90 percent. According to Evert, with her form of the disease there would otherwise have been a 75 percent chance of developing breast cancer.

Now Evert only has one more surgery to do for reconstruction. "They say this part is easy, but I can assure you the past five years have not been," writes the 68-year-old. "My sister's trip saved my life and I hope that by sharing it I can save mine, maybe someone else's."