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Leander Adrian Paes was born on 17th June 1973 in Kolkata. He shifted between Kolkata, Chennai and Goa during his childhood. He grew up mostly in Kolkata. He is the great grandson of the famous Bengali poet, Michael Madhusudhan Dutt. His father, Vece Paes, was a midfielder in the Indian hockey team that played in the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. His mother, Jennifer Paes, was the Captain of the Indian basketball team in the 1980 Asian basketball championship.
Leander Paes studied at the La Martiniere School in Kolkata and went to St. Xavier’s College there. He enrolled in the Britannia Amritraj Tennis Academy in Chennai in 1985. He was coached by Dave O’Meara. His stint at the Academy was very important in his early development. He spent a lot of his youth in Goa.
Leander Paes is carrying India’s flag forward in lawn tennis for a long time now. He has won many titles all over the world in the singles, doubles and mixed doubles ties. He rose to fame on an international level when he won the Junior Wimbledon Title and the Junior U.S. Open title in his seventeenth year in 1990 and claimed the top ranking as a junior player in the world.
Leander Paes features mostly on the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) Tour and the Davis Cup Tournament. Apart from his twelve Grand Slams wins at the doubles and mixed doubles events, he is also famous for his numerous Davis Cup performances and for winning the bronze medal for India in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. This was the highpoint of his career. He became the only Indian after K.D. Jadhav to win a bronze medal in the discipline of lawn tennis in Olympic Games. K.D. Jadhav had won a bronze medal for India in lawn tennis at the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games. The Atlanta match was one of the greatest performances of Leander Paes’ career as he was playing with a badly injured wrist. At the earlier Olympic Games in 1992 at Barcelona, he came up to the quarter final stage in the men’s doubles event with Ramesh Krishnan. He was accorded the honour of carrying the Indian flag at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics.
Leander Paes went though moderate seasons in the years 1993 and 1994. In 1995, he reached the quarter finals of the Australian Open doubles. Leander Paes has won the French Open and the Wimbledon Doubles title in 1999 with Mahesh Bhupathi. In 1999, he also won the Mixed Doubles at Wimbledon with Lisa Raymond, making it a rare double at Wimbledon that year. He won the French Open 2001 Doubles title with Mahesh Bhupathi. He won the Mixed Doubles at the Australian Open in 2003 with Martina Navratilova. He won the U.S. Open Doubles title in 2006 with Martin Damm. In 2010, he won the Australian Open Mixed Doubles with Cara Black.
Earlier this year, Leander Paes’ and Mahesh Bhupathi’s reunion has made them the best doubles pair in the world in the month of April. Leander Paes, like Mahesh Bhupathi, has been taking acting lessons for the last year and a half. He is going to make his acting debut in a film called `Rajdhani Express’. Leander Paes was going steady with Mahima Chaudhry and Amisha Patel before marrying Rhea Pillai, ex-wife of actor Sanjay Dutt. He has a daughter by the name of Aiyana Paes.
Leander Paes has been elected Honourary Life Member of the Chandigarh Lawn Tennis Association. He has received the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award in 1996 and the Padma Shri in 2001. He is now considered as one of the greatest contemporary players in doubles as well as mixed doubles in the world. He has already competed in five Olympic Games so far. Leander Paes has become only the second player in the world after Rod Laver to win the Wimbledon titles stretching three different decades from 1990 to 2011. Last year, he has joined the Board of Directors of the Olympics Gold Quest along with Geet Sethi and Prakash Padukone. The organisation helps in promoting talented athletes from India and prepares them for doing well in the Olympic Games.
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