A conversation with Monica Seles rarely lacks light and shade. One moment she is breezily discussing her passion for adopting rescue dogs and why she seeks out those who might be otherwise ignored because of a lack of cuteness. Then, in the same breath, she is revealing that her "other big passion is talking about mental health. I struggled with an eating disorder that started right after my stabbing.”

Seles' character and career are anything but simple, and yet both have been framed by that one terrifying incident in Hamburg in April 1993. Seles was taking a break on court in a match with Magdalena Maleeva when Günter Parche - an obsessed devotee of Steffi Graf, the Yugoslav's chief rival at the time - sprinted down to the front of the stand, leant over the advertising hoardings and stabbed her between the shoulder blades with a boning knife.

The grainy video footage of Seles, then only 19, slumping to the ground, clutching her back, while spectators wrestle Parche to the floor in the background, has lost none of its shock value in the intervening 26 years, and yet nobody who saw it at the time - least of all Seles, who added only one more grand-slam title to the eight she had won as a teenager - could have guessed its impact. The physical wounds may have healed relatively quickly - miraculously, Parche's weapon only penetrated 1½cm - but the psychological scars are still red raw.