The 18-time Grand Slam champion, fresh off a Netflix documentary about her health journey, revealed the devastating news just days before Wimbledon begins
There is a kind of courage in telling the truth when the truth is hard, doing it publicly, doing it repeatedly, and doing it not because the world demands it but because you believe someone out there needs to hear it.
At 71 years old, Chris Evert has been doing exactly that for five years now. And on Thursday, June 25, she did it again.
In a statement posted to Instagram, the tennis legend revealed that her ovarian cancer has returned for the second time since her initial 2021 diagnosis, making this her third overall battle with the disease.
The news arrived just as she was preparing to cover Wimbledon for ESPN. The timing could not have been more bittersweet, the grass courts at the All England Club, a place where Evert won three singles titles and built much of her legend, will begin their fortnight on June 29, and she will be watching from home instead of commentating courtside.
It is a loss for the sport’s most prestigious tournament, and an even greater one for the woman who has given so much of herself to the game.
Evert opened her statement with characteristic directness: “I have always believed in being open and honest about my health journey. This past weekend, after undergoing CT and PET scans, I learned that my ovarian cancer has returned.”
She confirmed that she had already undergone surgery and will begin chemotherapy in the coming weeks.
There was no hedging, no soft-pedaling, just the kind of unvarnished candor that has made her one of the most trusted voices in tennis since she first picked up a racket as a five-year-old in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, under the coaching of her father, Jimmy Evert.
A Five-Year Battle That Refuses to End
To understand what this third diagnosis means, you have to go back to the beginning. In 2020, Chris Evert lost her younger sister, Jeanne Evert Dubin, to ovarian cancer. It was a loss that sent Evert on a path she might never have chosen otherwise.
She pursued genetic testing, and the results showed she carried a mutation in her BRCA1 gene, a genetically inherited change that significantly increases the odds of developing both breast and ovarian cancer.
Acting on that information, she scheduled a preventive hysterectomy. During the procedure in December 2021, surgeons found a tumor in one of her fallopian tubes, and she was diagnosed with Stage 1C ovarian cancer, meaning the tumor was confined to one or both ovaries or the fallopian tubes, but some cancer cells had spread just outside the organs.
The diagnosis was devastating, but the early catch was everything. “My doctors considered it a preventative surgery,” Evert told CBS Sunday Morning of the hysterectomy that ultimately found the cancer.
She went through chemotherapy and, determined to reduce every risk available to her, also underwent a preventive double mastectomy in 2022. In January 2023, she announced she was cancer-free.
The tennis world exhaled. Then later that same year, the cancer returned. It was caught early again, treated again, and by 2024, Evert once more announced she was clear.
Each cycle of diagnosis and remission brought fresh hope and fresh dread, a rhythm that anyone who has watched a loved one face recurring cancer will recognize instantly.
This year, that rhythm repeated. Evert had been getting scans every three months. “I have a moment like praying when I’m getting my CAT scan and you never know. You never know. You never know,” she said in a recent interview with People magazine.
She knew the risk never disappears, it only waits. When the latest scans came back and surgery followed, Evert made the decision she always makes: she told the world.
Why Ovarian Cancer Keeps Coming Back, and Why That Matters
Some people have questioned whether having ovarian cancer three times is unusual. The medical community’s answer is sobering: with this particular disease, it is not.
Dr. Laurie Brunette, a gynecologic oncologist at City of Hope Orange County in Irvine, California, explained to Yahoo that one reason ovarian cancers are more likely to recur is that they are so often diagnosed at a late stage.
“We usually don’t catch it until it is Stage 3 or 4, and at that point it’s usually spread already around the abdomen and possibly other places in the body,” she said.
“It does respond well to surgery and chemotherapy and other drugs we have, but just because it is diagnosed so late, there is that really high risk of it coming back.”
Evert’s case is unusual only in the sense that it was caught early, twice, and now three times, because of consistent monitoring and the genetic knowledge that put her under heightened surveillance.
The American Cancer Society estimates that roughly 21,000 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2026, and about 12,450 will die from the disease, though the death rate has dropped 45% since 1976 largely due to improved treatment options.
The disease’s stubbornness is not a personal failure; it is a function of biology and the limits of medicine. What Evert’s openness has done over five years is humanize those statistics for millions of people, which is exactly the point.
Throughout every round of diagnosis, treatment, and remission, Evert has used her platform to encourage people with a family history of cancer to explore genetic testing, to get checked, to not assume that because they feel fine they are fine.
It is a message she has delivered with the same precision she once used to place a backhand down the line, and the impact has been real.
Her story has given language and permission to countless people who might otherwise have delayed or avoided the kind of screening that could save their lives.
The World Responds, and a Documentary Arrives at the Hardest Possible Moment
The outpouring of support after Evert’s announcement was immediate. ESPN executive vice president of production Mike McQuade released a statement that read: “Our thoughts are with our ESPN tennis colleague Chris Evert as she deals with this personal health issue.
We will certainly miss her at Wimbledon and wish her all the best. We look forward to having her back with us whenever she feels ready to return.”
Evert has been a fixture in ESPN’s tennis coverage since 2011, and her absence from the Wimbledon broadcast booth will be felt by viewers who have grown accustomed to hearing her voice as the soundtrack to the sport’s grandest slam.
Among those who responded most powerfully was Martina Navratilova, Evert’s greatest rival and, in the years since both women faced their own health battles, one of her closest friends.
Navratilova left a message in Evert’s comments that read: “My friend Chrissie is a champion of champions and as such she will slay this monster again.
We are all pulling for you, and know you will come out on the other side cancer free again, lots of love, m.”
The note was brief, but it carried the weight of everything the two women have been through, the decades of rivalry, the complex evolution of their friendship, and the shared experience of facing serious illness in the public eye.
The timing of the announcement is striking for one more reason. On June 26, just one day after Evert shared her diagnosis, Netflix released Chris & Martina: The Final Set, a documentary that explores both women’s decades-long dominance of women’s tennis and a friendship that cancer could not break.
Directed by two-time Emmy Award winner Rebecca Gitlitz, the film features never-before-seen footage and rare interviews, and takes audiences inside the cancer treatments both legends have navigated.
The documentary captures something the diagnosis announcement only hints at, the interior experience of a woman who has spent five years learning how to hold hope and dread at the same time.
In the film, Evert reflects on her second recurrence: “The second time really hit home how precious every moment is, how precious life is.”
And in another scene that has taken on new resonance since Thursday, Evert is asked what excites her most about the future, and her answer is a single word: “Living.”
That word lands differently now. But it also tells you exactly who Chris Evert is. She is not someone who dresses her reality up in softer language than the moment deserves. She knows what she is facing. She has faced versions of it before.
And she intends to face it again with the same approach she brought to every tennis court she ever walked onto: prepared, determined, and certain that the match is not over until it is over.
She closed her Instagram statement with a message to everyone following her journey: “I am deeply grateful to my medical team, my family, friends, and everyone who has reached out with kindness and encouragement.
I look forward to seeing everyone again soon.” It is the kind of ending only someone who genuinely believes it would write. Eighteen Grand Slam titles, one of the longest and most formidable careers in the history of women’s tennis, and a fight that is not finished yet.
