Boris Becker won the Sports Book Awards prize for International Sports Book of the Year. He still could not enter London to collect it. Lilian de Carvalho Monteiro took the prize for him at the Kia Oval cricket stadium, a sharp split between the book’s success and the ban that keeps him out of Great Britain.
Becker and London
The award went to his memoir, Inside. Gewinnen, verlieren, neu anfangen, published by HarperCollins. Inside reached No. 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list in Great Britain and became an international bestseller, putting Becker back at the center of a market he still cannot enter in person.
That absence is tied to April 2022, when a London court sentenced him to two and a half years in prison for insolvency offenses. He spent 230 days in prison in England and was deported from Great Britain, which is why the ceremony in London played out with his wife on stage instead of Becker in the room.
Lilian de Carvalho Monteiro
De Carvalho Monteiro accepted the award on Thursday evening and told the room: "Mein Mann kann heute Abend leider nicht hier sein, aber er ist zu Hause und kümmert sich um unsere wunderschöne Tochter, die heute sechs Monate alt wird. Aber ich weiß, dass er eines Tages nach London zurückkehren wird – und zu seinem Lieblingsturnier Wimbledon." She also said: "Mein Liebster, als deine Frau bin ich unglaublich stolz auf dich!"
The family detail ran alongside the prize itself. Becker and de Carvalho Monteiro became parents to their daughter Zoë Vittoria Becker on 21 November, and the child was six months old at the time of the ceremony. Becker later called the award "eine ganz besondere Freude" and said, "Ich konnte da zwei hochkarätige Sportler besiegen."
Inside and the award race
Becker said his book mattered because it let him tell his own story after years of public judgment. "Fast mein ganzes Leben lang haben mich die Menschen öffentlich beurteilt. Zuerst als Tennisspieler, später als Mensch. Manchmal fair, manchmal unfair, aber immer öffentlich. Deshalb war es mir so wichtig, meine Geschichte in meinen eigenen Worten zu erzählen," he said.
He added that family support shaped the comeback reflected in the memoir: "Ohne die Unterstützung meiner Familie, insbesondere meiner Frau Lilian, wäre ich heute nicht da, wo ich bin." The award also put him ahead of Carlos Alcaraz and Ayrton Senna in the competition, while leaving the most obvious contrast intact: a book about rebuilding life in Britain was honored in London by the wife of a man still barred from re-entering the country.
