By DPA
Montreal : Martina Hingis and Radek Stepanek are no longer engaged to be married, the ATP announced after Stepanek lost the Montreal Masters semi-final to Roger Federer.
“Radek asked me to pass on a message announcing that he and Martina Hingis have split up. They will remain good friends, and that is all I have to say,” an ATP spokesman said Saturday.
Hingis, who won five Grand Slam titles as a teenager and returned to the game in January 2006 after a three-year retirement, has been bothered with back problems.
The women’s world number 12 has withdrawn from next week’s WTA event in Toronto.
Stepanek has successfully come back from a nerve injury affecting his hand, winning 12 of 14 matches before losing to Federer.
Hingis, 26, and the 28-year-old Stepanek knew each other as junior players in the former Czechoslovakia before Hingis moved to Switzerland when her mother remarried.
She had posed happily in January in Australia with her engagement ring, noting that Swiss media had not noticed it on her finger in December.