Tennis great Martina Navratilova revealed Monday that she has been diagnosed with both throat and breast cancer. Both cancers are stage one and the prognosis is good, she said in a statement to the Women’s Tennis Association website.
“This double whammy is serious but still fixable. I’m hoping for a favorable outcome,” Navratilova said in the statement. “It’s going to stink for a while, but I’ll fight with all (I’ve) got.”
Navratilova, 66, said she underwent testing in November after finding an enlarged lymph node in her neck during the WTA Finals in Fort Worth, Texas. Her doctors found stage one throat cancer and, later, unrelated stage one breast cancer.
She battled breast cancer once before in 2010, undergoing a successful lumpectomy to remove the cancerous cells.
“I didn’t need to have chemo,” she told CNN at the time. “The surgery was minor. I was out of the hospital that day so nothing to really knock me on my butt and really suffer from, so I was fortunate that I got the kind of cancer that you can control this way.”
Navratilova, widely considered one of the best tennis players of all time, has won 59 Grand Slam titles overall, including 31 in women’s doubles and 10 in mixed doubles. The last was a mixed doubles championship with Bob Bryan at the 2006 U.S. Open, a month shy of her 50th birthday.
She originally retired in 1994, after a record 167 singles titles and 331 weeks at No. 1 in the WTA rankings. She returned to the tour to play doubles in 2000 and occasionally competed in singles, too.
Navratilova was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2000. She has worked as a TV analyst in recent years.
According to the WTA, Navratilova’s treatments begin next week, mostly in New York City. She does not plan to be a regular part of the Tennis Channel’s coverage of the Australian Open this month, but hopes to occasionally join in via video call.