Tennis legend Bjorn Borg reveals cocaine use in memoir

Swedish tennis icon Bjorn Borg opens up, in an autobiography published on Thursday, about his prostate cancer and struggles with a cocaine addiction that made him feel “terribly ashamed”.

In his memoir, entitled Heartbeats: a memoir, the 69-year-old former tennis player reveals that he went through several years of addiction and battles against “his demons”.

“The first time I tried cocaine, I felt a rush as strong as what tennis had given me in the past,” he wrote of his first experience with cocaine in the early 1980s at the iconic New York nightclub Studio 54.

The worst of his struggles were when he lived in Milan in the early 1990s, when he was married to Italian singer Loredana Berte.

“We had bad influences, and… drugs and pills within reach. There, I was plunged into the deepest darkness,” he recounts.

In 1996, he collapsed on a bridge in the Netherlands just ahead of an exhibition tournament.

When he awoke in hospital, his father was standing next to him. 

“He said nothing, it was so embarrassing,” Borg recalled while appearing on the interview show Skavlan on public broadcaster SVT.

“I was terribly ashamed.”

In his book, he also reveals that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in September 2023. 

“The risk of it coming back still exists, and it’s something I will have to live with for a while, with the anxiety of not knowing… if the cancer was caught in time,” Borg states.

He must have a check-up every six months to ensure the cancer has not returned.

In his Skavlan appearance, he stressed that he was exercising every day, but admitted that he had not “played tennis in six years”.

Borg dominated tennis by winning Wimbledon five times and the French Open six times, before ending his career at the age of 26 in 1983.

Asked about doping in the sport, he said: “I know it exists among juniors.” 

Borg spoke about Jannik Sinner and how he had resumed working with his former fitness trainer Umberto Ferrara despite the pair having parted ways after the Italian world number two tested positive for an anabolic steroid that earned him a three-month suspension.

“He fired one of his trainers, his fitness coach. And then, once everything calmed down, he rehired the same fitness coach. I find that very strange. I don’t know more,” Borg stated.