Varvara Lepchenko tells RIA Novosti that the reason she played Moscow this week despite being sick was that she wanted to return to a former Soviet country for the first time since she sought asylum in the U.S. after fleeing her native Uzbekistan.
“I wanted to experience, after 12 years, being back in the Soviet Union. So I tried the best I could,” she said.
Now a U.S. citizen, Lepchenko added that the reason why she and her father fled to the U.S. was because, “I wasn’t accepted in Uzbekistan as their own.”
When Lepchenko was 16, she arrived alone at a junior tournament in Miami to find Uzbek tennis authorities had abandoned her.
“A couple of days before the tournament start, I couldn’t find myself on the entry list, and so I was like ‘What’s going on?’ They told me that the Uzbek federation withdrew me from playing, that they didn’t want me to play,” Lepchenko said. “They saw me crying, I was only 16 years old, and they were like, ‘Well, then, we’re not going to stop anyone from playing tennis. You just have to get in touch with this person and you represent the United States. We’ll enter you from our country.”