A love story that lasts! In 2005, Gilles Simon, a famous professional tennis player, met Carine Lauret, a young woman working in the communications department of Bouygues. A year and a half later, she quit her job to follow him around the world. If this daily life pleased her for a while, she had more difficulty supporting it over the years… In January 2015, in the columns of L’Équipe, Carine Lauret had declared: “At the beginning, I liked it a lot Gilles allowed me to discover the world. Beautiful places, beautiful hotels, life without constraints, without cooking, without cleaning.” She then regretted: “In fact, little by little, Gilles uprooted me. I cut ties with the people I loved. And I lost my personality. Even my mother introduced me by saying: ‘ She is Gilles Simon’s wife.’ Sometimes my relatives called me just to ask me about Gilles. I didn’t really exist anymore and I was fed up.”
Finally, Carine Lauret stopped following her husband everywhere and went back to work in Paris for a year and a half. “I no longer liked being the wife of (…) I had an overdose of my boyfriend when I no longer saw him! It’s very difficult to find your place. On the one hand, I “I feel boundless pride for him. On the other, I tell myself that I am shit, that I am worthless”, she had lamented, before slipping: “I was 24 when I knew, I had a huge ambition, the desire to do lots of things, but all my projects were stopped. Referring to their two sons, she explained: “Fortunately, with the children, I always go back, because I am busy with something else. Besides, when he is bad, I try to involve him with the children, because they are the only ones who can make us forget tennis.” Believing that motherhood had changed her life, she added: “Since then, I am no longer the green plant waiting for her boyfriend (…) I went from ‘wife of…’ to ‘mom of… ‘”
Carine Lauret: “I can’t live without him”
Cash, it is in the columns of the magazine that she had confided to being the opposite of other women of top athletes. “I don’t have any friends on the circuit (…) the girls of Federer, Djokovic or others are inaccessible. Sometimes you try smiles, but it doesn’t come back… They are perched, surrounded by thousand people. What do you want me to tell her, Mirka Federer? She has four nannies per child, we don’t live in the same world,” she said. Still just as in love with her husband, she added: “We love each other, we love each other, we love each other. If I’m doing all this, it’s because Gilles, I can’t live without him.”
Gilles Simon © JB Autissier
