Annabel Croft: ‘I don't want to be a professional widow but I'm not ready for another partner'

Telegraph

9 hours ago

Annabel Croft, one time girls' Wimbledon winner, tennis commentator, pundit and Strictly semi-finalist, recently found a piece of English homework from when she was eleven in 1978. It was entitled 'What I Would Like to Do'.
She had picked up a tennis racket only two years earlier, during a family holiday in Spain. In the ensuing decade, little did she know that she would become Britain's brightest young female tennis star. 'I would like to be able to… win Wimbledon,' she wrote. 'Before I get to [sic] old, I would like to dance on stage… before I am to [sic] old I would like to get married because if you are too [sic] old you cannot have children… Also, your husband protects you.'
This afternoon, we are sitting at the kitchen island in Croft's six-bedroom neo-classical home, designed by her late husband Mel Coleman twenty five years ago. The house, part of a gated estate in Kingston, is a short drive away from the grass courts of Wimbledon. When Croft was selected for the main draw there at the age of 15, she was the youngest to play there for 95 years. In 1984, a month before her 18th birthday, she won the girls' junior title.
It's hard to square that Croft is now 58-years-old – 59 next month. She doesn't look that different from the press cuttings of thirty-five years ago, which are stacked up in the hallway as she prepares for a 28-date speaking tour about her life this September.
She does a lot of walking and yoga these days, as well as playing tennis – and it shows. Wearing a Me+Em brown linen jumpsuit and mules, she has a baked-in tan (she founded her Annabel Croft academy in Portugal, which Coleman oversaw until he died two years ago). Her famous mane of hair, always tied back in a high pony or plait when she was the Raducanu of her day, now cascades around her shoulders.
The French Open is on in the background. 'That was incredible,' she says after Aryna Sabalenka catches out Coco Gauff, before the ultimate glory was claimed by Gauff, who Croft is rooting for to win Wimbledon.
Croft spent the first ten days of this year's Roland Garros commentating for BBC Radio Five Live. Tomorrow, two of her three children, Amber Rose, 30 (six months pregnant) and Charlie, 29 (about to get married), are coming over for lunch to watch the men's final between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, a game that lasted 5hr 29 mins; the second longest in grand slam history. Her youngest daughter, Lily, 26, lives in Dubai.
This week, Croft is getting ready to begin commentating at the HSBC Championships at the Queen's Club, as women's events return there for the first time since 1973. Ten members of the women's top 20 will be playing, including Katie Boulter and Emma Raducanu. When I ask if she has 'special interests', she murmurs about Alcaraz and Raducanu, the former for being so utterly brilliant, thought of as the new Nadal, the latter because her trajectory has been so uneven, yet her promise never diminished.
It has been two years since Croft did the splits on Strictly, reaching fourth place, dancing with the energy, stamina and natural skill that must initially have surprised both her partner, Johannes Radebe, now one of her best friends, and the judges. It felt like every step was imbued with the emotion of her personal tragedy.
Mel Coleman died at Kingston Hospital in May 2023, just 12 weeks after he was diagnosed with Stage four colon cancer, which had spread throughout his body; 97 per cent of his liver was covered with tumours. Her husband of 30 years, they married in 1993 two days before her 27th birthday but they first met when she was just 21; she was in Sri Lanka making a TV show about learning to sail – Coleman was part of the sailing crew. She shows me an old VCR tape: 'The moment I first met him and shook his hand is captured right here.' Then, Coleman was an America's Cup and Admiral's Cup sailor, before switching to investment banking.
Not long after meeting him Croft made the decision to retire from tennis. She was 21, ranked 24th in the world but had become tired of the tennis life, of hanging around in motels trying to scrabble enough for the bus fare to the next tournament: 'I knew I didn't want to live my life as a tennis player until I was 30. I was emotionally intelligent early on to have worked that out.'
Sensing the happiness to be found in normal life off the circuit, and given, by then, she was something of a household name, she moved into entertainment: 'There wasn't a Sky TV, or Eurosport so I couldn't move straight into commentary. I had to find other ways to make money.'
'You can't sit back and wait for things to come to you'
She began doing pantomime: 'I needed the panto to give me confidence. If you force yourself into uncomfortable places you suddenly realise it's not as terrifying as you thought.'
Immediately after her retirement in 1988 she took over from Anneka Rice on Channel 4's Treasure Hunt. 'I was always someone who thought you can't sit back and wait for things to come to you. You have to make things happen. No one gets up in the morning and thinks 'I'm going to help Annabel today.''
'We grew together,' she says of Coleman. She gestures around the house, and points outside to the tennis court: 'The court was the first thing we put in.' When Coleman died, the couple had been in the process of planning their retirement, selling this house and relocating down the road to a smaller one. Every night, at bedtime Coleman told her he'd miss her until the morning: 'I didn't know I had an incredible marriage, but I did,' she says. She is composed. Her grief is not as raw as it was after Strictly, now it 'comes in rain showers, but they are getting less – and then it's gone.'
'You know he died of sepsis?' she asks me. The cancer had spread – he eschewed the opportunity for chemo for a better quality of life, and it's thought a tumour perforated on a flight back from Portugal. On his return, he was admitted as an emergency.
His death was as sudden as his diagnosis (both, she says, badly handled by Kingston Hospital). By July – 'literally within a few weeks [of losing him] I was on the phone to my agent. He said ' I've signed you up to Strictly. You're giving an interview tomorrow because they are announcing it.' I don't know what I would have done without being busy. I would have sunk.'
Strictly, she says, saved her – it also gave her Radebe – 'we are bonded for life'. He calls her all the time. Sometimes they talk for two hours. 'He's part of the family now,' she says, and shows me a picture of him lined up with her children: 'Look! He's wearing Mel's sliders there.'
Her 1978 A4 homework is on the table in front of us. 'Nice ideas,' her English teacher wrote. It's as though Croft foretold her life, minus the tragedy. 'But there is so much to be positive about,' she says. By September, she will be a grandmother and she has properly rediscovered dance. During the tour, she will dance on stage: 'I don't want to be a professional widow. I understand that a lot of people can identify with what I've been through, but I don't want grief to define me.
'I've wondered whether I went down the wrong path'
'People say I have been so generous with my emotions, but I have always been like that. Strictly was so helpful to me. I realised how much I loved dancing and I've wondered whether I went down the wrong path [with tennis] when I might have been a dancer instead.'
Two years on from Strictly, she is in the process of downsizing: 'I mean, it's too big!' she says, 'it's ridiculous. I'm rattling around here. The house has served its purpose.' She is clearing three decades of family life, including Coleman's possessions, his clothes and shoes. The family baby grand which sat in the hallway for twenty-five years has already gone. She's gravitating towards her eldest daughter (and her imminent grandchild) in Battersea, near enough to her friends and to Wimbledon. 'Mel had always wanted a water view [because of his sailing] and I do too because it will connect me to him.'
Croft grew up in Farnborough, Kent, in a comfortable home with two siblings, an older brother and a younger sister. Her parents, James, a chartered surveyor, and Susan, a housewife, were 'keen tennis players' but neither of them coaches or professionals.
They had a tennis court in the garden but it was at a Spanish hotel tennis tournament that she caught the bug. Her mother then started driving her 20 minutes to Park Langley tennis club in Beckenham, dropping her off 'with 50p in my pocket for the cost of my lesson, a packet of crisps and a drink of squash, and I'd stay there all day. It was forehands on a Monday, backhands on a Tuesday, Wednesday was volleys, Thursdays serves and then playing points.'
She shows me a collection of childhood log books with scores: lists and lists of tennis partners – mostly boys – whom she organised into being her opponents. But she'd play anybody, often 'wily old dogs'. What is telling about this is the extent of her drive.
'I'd have charts up on the fridge. It totally came from me. It should always come from the child. I met one of those boys recently and he said 'I used to love coming to you because you always bossed us around and set all the drills. You organised everything.''
As she started to hit a different league, she missed more and more school: 'My dad was always writing requests to the head mistress to ask for time off: 'Annabel won't be there on Friday, Annabel will miss this week for a tournament'. Slowly I dropped subjects until I was just down to maths, English and sport. I once sat a geography test, turned over the page and realised I didn't know a single thing.'
At fifteen, she moved to Houston, Texas for five years to train with a coach, who was the mixed doubles partner to Billie Jean King.'I travelled around the world six or seven times – that was my education. But it's so gladiatorial. It's like a boxing match.'
She plays me an audio clip of a match with 'an American girl' at the Albert Hall, with Des Lynam commentating: 'I'd had hypnotherapy before that'. She suffered badly from nerves. Would a sports psychologist have helped her? Made a difference to your longevity? I ask: 'I don't think so. I knew myself.'
She is adamant that she made the right decision to retire. Today, there is an added pressure: Raducanu has recently had to deal with a creepy superfan who was evicted the Dubai Tennis Championships, 'but [sadly] that comes with the territory,' says Croft. 'There's way more security now, but what has changed is the birth of social media. Tennis players today, if they lose matches, get abuse from betting people who are going to lose a lot of money on somebody's match, and then they start attacking the player. That is a lot of stress and pressure. I wouldn't have been able to take that.'
Her life in retirement was about pushing on, pushing through the pain barrier in a different way: 'Sometimes I'd be on the floor with a panic attack [with speaking engagements] but it was Bear Grylls who gave me the best advice. Mel is godfather to his first son. He said 'Annabel, don't try to be somebody you are not.'
Perhaps it is because she is, as she says, 'a naturally sunny person' that she has fared so well on mainstream television. She shows me a tabloid from 1988 where she's on the front page wearing a bikini, publicising her role in the Channel 4 reality show Survivor, which involved a group of people attempting to survive on a deserted island. There are photographs in Hello – it's easy to forget how famous she was back then.
'I want to simplify my life'
I can see why she invites such love and loyalty: 'My oldest friend from when I was seven often comes to stay with her husband.' Her children have gathered around her. Her son Charlie phones her every day during his coffee break: 'They are always asking 'what are your plans, who are you having dinner with? Come and join us!'' But she's a very long way from thinking of another partner, 'I can't think about it at the moment. I just really can't.'
'I want to simplify my life, maybe go on walking holidays and be close to family to help. I don't have a driving ambition anymore [but] I am probably kidding myself when I think I would be happy if I just did nothing. If there is one message I have in my tour, it is do something that makes you happy because you never know what is round the corner.'
Coleman was an investment banker for about 18 years, commuting on the tube and sitting behind a desk, but he was 'a free-spirited yachtsman' whom Croft says should never have had an office job: 'I used to call him Crocodile Dundee.' The white van they converted into 'Vannabel' for camping holidays sits on the drive: 'It's a difficult one. I don't know what to do with it.'
Coleman's treatment during his illness has left its mark. The delivery of his diagnosis was blunt, but it was his end-of-life care that was truly horrific. The news of his imminent death was broken to Croft and the family callously by a nurse, as Coleman lay within earshot.
This time, it was Croft who wanted to protect him, the 6ft 4in towering man she nicknamed 'Mr Incredible', who only three months earlier had been entertaining everyone, able to fix everything in the house. The lack of kindness in this worst moment was incomprehensible to her. She says 'I have had several meetings since and I've received an apology from the hospital.' She still finds it hard to discuss: 'It's such an awful subject. We don't need to talk about it now. Maybe sometime over a glass of wine.'
Mercifully, she says, in the 12 weeks leading up to Coleman's death, both of them had been supported by Dr Isabella Cooper, a biochemist specialising in mitochondria, leading a team of cancer researchers at Westminster Hospital. Through a strict ketogenic diet (based on eliminating sugar, low carb, meat heavy) Dr Isabella Cooper reduced the tumour coverage on Coleman's liver from 97 per cent to 70 percent.
It appeared that his new diet was holding the disease back, before the sepsis set in: 'I'm at peace with the fact that Mel died with hope, rather than no hope.' Croft says. 'Isabella gave us so much hope. She was the only person who gave Mel hope. And if one positive thing can come out of losing Mel, I would love to give a platform to her work.'
She still talks to Cooper every day and now follows a mostly sugar-free diet. She opens her fridge to show me streaky bacon without sugar additives and smoked salmon with no hidden sugars: 'I have a huge appetite,' she says. You've got to be kidding? 'Oh yes! I ate the same amount as Mel.'
'But I have a very high metabolism and my children say to me 'slow down'.'
There is something very old school about Annabel Croft, much like Wimbledon itself. This month Croft will again be part of the BBC's commentary lineup at the tournament. Shortly after Strictly, she appeared at the Princess of Wales' trophy presentation, interviewing the Wimbledon winners. 'The standards at Wimbledon are incredibly high,' she says. 'Everything is immaculate, from the manicured plants to the seating to not a cable being out of place.'
However, this year will be the first tournament without human line judges, replaced by AI-powered cameras: 'I'm torn. I'd rather have the correct line call if somebody's Grand Slam is riding on a bad call [from a judge]. People do have less attention span and it will speed tennis up, but the line judges are full of personality and it makes tennis entertaining.'
I can't draw her to express a view on the thorny issue of trans women competing in female categories. 'I'm not in a place where I want to attract unwanted aggression towards me.' But I can tell she does have views, 'Maybe if I'd retired I'd express a view. I do think there isn't enough debate anymore – or humour. Certain subjects have been shut down, we have not been allowed to debate them.'
Croft is a big fan of TCW (formerly called The Conservative Woman) the online magazine and podcast created by her friend Kathy Gyngell to defend freedom of speech and challenge Left-liberal thinking: 'I adore her. She is a woman who will stand up for what she believes in. She is the brightest woman I have ever met. I admire her courage.'
Courage is a good word for Croft too – and resilience: 'Ooh I should use that word more.' In the space of two years, she has gone from not knowing how online banking works – 'Mel did all of that' – to being able to take the back of the tumble dryer to fix it: 'I remember seeing him do it. When it broke down, I went and got his tool box.' Water streamed through the roof shortly after he died – she dealt with that. She can pump up a car tyre as well.
'Mel's watching over me and teaching me a lot. I probably would have gone my whole life never doing these things had Mel been around. But I can do it all now. I've learned I can do things on my own, things I didn't ever think I could.'