Zhuhai (China) (AFP)

Spring 1992, Sarajavo is besieged by Bosnian Serb troops. Zaneta Dzumhur, pregnant, makes her way through the disemboweled streets, trading on the barricades, avoiding sniper fire to reach the hospital where she will give birth on May 20 to a son. Twenty-seven years later, Damir told AFP his road to the summits of world tennis.

"On May 21, my uncle came to pick us up at the hospital and on May 22, the hospital was evacuated just before being bombed," Dzumhur said on the sidelines of the Zhuhai tournament where he was eliminated on Friday in the quarter-finals. final.

"We were fortunate to have someone to get us back and a place to live the first few months," said the player who is now 93rd in the world but who reached the 23rd rank of the ATP in July 2018 and won to date 3 titles. His rise in the global hierarchy has been slowed in recent months by injuries.

"I know that for my mother it was the most difficult time and the worst of her life, but at the same time the most beautiful," he said "You have a baby, you have just given birth, but you are in the middle of a war without any place to go and without your husband. "

Like many, Damir's father, Nerfid Dzumhur, had fled the Bosnian capital. And when he saw his son for the first time, he was almost a year old.

"Eleven months (after my birth), he managed to return to the city to see me, risking his life too," said Damir.

During 44 months of siege, some 350,000 residents of Sarajevo were deprived of basic necessities and at least 10,000 of them were killed by sniper bombs and bullets.

- Cinema -

Damir Dzumhur was too young to have precise memories of the chaos in which he lived his very first years. But as soon as the war ended, his father put him on tennis.

Boy, he made his first scales in the dilapidated Zetra Olympic Hall but once again became a dedicated sports venue after being a morgue and shelter for refugees during the war years.

"Zetra was still in shambles, the windows were blown up and some was burned down," and as part of its rehabilitation, a hockey rink was built next to the tennis court, the player recalled.

"It was just hot enough to feel the racket in his hands," he said with a smile.

His future in tennis being far from being traced, in adolescence Damir had the opportunity to experience cinema.

He first had a very small role in the film Grbavica, released in France under the title Sarajevo my love, before starring in a German film shot in Sarajevo.

"The first time in my life that I made money was thanks to the movies," he pointed out, noting that he did not rule out the possibility of a day's return to cinema.

But for the moment, only the desire to succeed in the world of tennis leads his career.

"Knowing where we come from, what we have lived all these days, these years, and knowing the difficulties we've been through since childhood, it really makes you different inside," he said. .

"In the end, each sacrifice ends well and ends in a happy ending" ... as in the cinema.

© 2019 AFP