Esther Vergeer’s Body, Art by Marielle Durand

This is an excerpt from my latest book, Tennis Players as Works of Art, now available on Amazon. Called “madly ambitious” and named one its 5 featured books of 2024 in the category of Art/Imagination/Creativity by Publisher’s Weekly Booklife, Tennis Players as Works of Art has also been named “One of the Best Books we Read in 2024” (Independent Book Review) and “Book of the Year” (Inside Tennis Magazine.)

I cry when I see that picture of me as a little girl. Helpless and alone after the surgery, she must lie on her stomach for a week. No one told mom or dad she might need a wheelchair. Alone in the bathroom after another gold medal, I must produce for the mandatory doping test. I need a catheter to pee for the rest of my life. That’s worse than losing your legs.*

How to feel, how to think, about Esther Vergeer, the greatest female wheelchair player of all time, posing nude for the cover of the ESPN Body Issue in 2010. I love how Marielle Durand makes her blonde hair a little blonder, her eyes a little brighter, more open. Is Vergeer engaging us and our thoughts? Is she looking off into the future when posing nude in a wheelchair will no longer be a big deal. I want to read Durand’s portrait from where I sit now, fourteen years after the fact. Or better, perhaps, a century after the fact: Women accepted. Disabled people accepted. The body accepted. Bodies are bodies. Nothing more, nothing less. Bodies are bodies unless you’re an athlete like Esther Vergeer:

Injury worries performance pressures opponents improving faster faster . . . Gold medal time. Best thing is to hit high spinners to her. Make it hard to slice. Doesn’t look impressive to all those watching, but it’s what I should do to win. Why worry about how it all looks. Battle of my life. Year after year without losing. An increasing pressure of being expected to win. New sponsors, too, who only know me as a legend who never loses. I double-fault, miss shots. Family in the stands. Dutch television, too. Why do I feel shame?

Easier to pose nude than perform as an athlete? When Donatello sculpts David as the first male nude for over a thousand years, everyone had different ideas about what the nude body might mean: the body as beautiful, the body as pride, the body as sensuality, the body as shame, the body as consciousness, the body as the seat of sin. But what about the body as a vehicle for performance. David beats Goliath, after all. He stands with one foot on his head.

I played with dolls, fought with my brother. My father taught me to ride a bike. Taught me taught me taught me even after we both knew I would never be able to ride a bike.

*All the sections in italics are based on the language and thoughts of Esther Vergeer from her biography: Fierce and Vulnerable.

Artist Bio for Marielle Durand: Artist, teacher and active member of Urban Sketchers, Marielle follows a red string: drawing. She watches, analyses and shows in her sketchbooks life and people she has met for more than 25 years. In Sarajevo, on the top of the Rockefeller Center, down in the Algerian desert or in her special “Blue from Auvergne”, she tries to capture beauty and moments. Since 2022, she is invited by the French Parliament to draw the debates and received an Urban Sketchers grant for this project. She takes part in many projects with people in need. Her work can be seen in Europe and the United States. Marielle is represented by Garance Illustration in North America.

To see more of Marielle Durand’s captivating artwork, you can visit her webpage or Instagram.

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