Kim Murray has opened up about the challenges of living with her husband, the tennis champion Andy Murray, through the injuries and losses of his 20 year career.
Andy, 37, ended his last ever tournament with a doubles defeat at the Paris Olympics after withdrawing from the singles competition.
He began dating Kim in 2005, the daughter of player-turned-coach Nigel Sears. The couple announced their engagement in 2014, marrying the following year. They share four children.
In a new interview with The Telegraph, Kim, 36, opened up about the struggles behind the scenes of his success, admitting that living with her husband became “hard work” after his winning streak took a hit.
When a hip injury forced Andy to withdraw from the US and Paris Open in 2017, the Scot lost his first-position ranking to Rafael Nadal while his wife was pregnant with their second child.
“That was really horrible, just to see him on a human level,” Kim, a painter, said of the period. “He’d reached the pinnacle in his sport, and he was at home with Sophia [their daughter], and he was in too much pain to get down onto the floor to play with her. It was really quite horrendous.
“It was very hard living with him throughout that. I was trying to bring up a small child and he was genuinely miserable. He was in pain. Just walking the dog was awful. And I found it awful too, because it was such hard work.”
Andy struggled to recover completely from the injury and underwent surgeries in 2018 and 2019.
“He tried so many things, but the impact of injury happened over such a protracted period over his career,” Kim continued.
“He was absolutely determined to recover after the hip resurfacing, and he did amazingly [Andy returned to the circuit four months after surgery], but then Covid hit. The timing was so cruel. He had just started to get some momentum and everything shut down.”
In addition to the challenges of watching her husband struggle through his injuries, Kim, who says she has “always found the WAG thing quite gross”, would receive scrutinising comments from friends during a period of match losses.
“There was a period [in 2019] when he was losing almost every week. Seeing Andy deal with that on a near daily basis, that was tough. My friends would say, ‘Is Andy all right?’ I’d say, ‘Well, your husband is not getting an appraisal in the office on a weekly basis on how well he’s doing, so no, he’s not.’”
Kim admitted: “It took a lot out of me to support Andy but I’m proud of the small part I played. He definitely couldn’t have done it without me.”
