We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Eleonore and Verginie Tchakarova. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Eleonore and Verginie below.

Eleonore and Verginie, appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

Hello to all the readers of Voyage MIA Magazine. We want to start by thanking Voyage Mia for inviting us for an interview and allowing us to shed more light on behind the scenes of the lives of professional athletes. Our names are Eleonore and Verginie Tchakarova, we are twin sisters, and we are professional tennis players from Bulgaria.
When it comes to the life of a professional tennis player, anyone you ask that is currently on tour will have at least one crazy story to tell.
One of our most recent risk-taking stories that we have was during Covid. As we all know, Covid-19 had a big hit on a lot of industries including professional sports. At first, competitions were fully suspended for a very long time. This is how we took a forced 9 month break from professional competition. Finally, the tournaments slowly started coming back with a lot of covid protocols to follow. Also, at that time Covid was brand new to the world and there was still no vaccination available. Yet, we really wanted to play again, so we took the risk to travel internationally, because we wanted to continue competing.
The tournament that we signed up for was held in a small beach town in Ecuador called Salinas. As you can already predict, the conditions were far from ideal. There was no hot water in the hotel, almost nothing was operating because of covid and there were policemen with machine guns walking everywhere to enforce curfew. It was scary to even walk to the supermarket which was two blocks away. As we mentioned earlier, the COVID vaccine was not available to the public yet, so going alone to a Latin country during the peek of the pandemic was a very risky decision. God forbid something happens and you actually need a pharmacy or a doctor, you would be in a very dangerous situation.
Considering all those risks, we still took a leap of faith and enrolled in the tournament. We stayed there for 2 weeks and had some of the best performances in our careers. Many people do not understand the love for the sport that athletes have and will consider our decisions very risky, but as the saying goes “ no risk, no reward.”

Eleonore and Verginie, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Athletic Blood Line: Our names are Eleonore and Verginie Tchakarova, we are twin sisters, and we are professional tennis players. We are born in Casablanca, Morocco, raised in Sofia, Bulgaria and currently living in Miami, Florida. When you learn about our family, you will understand why we HAD to play a sport professionally. Our mother is a former professional swimmer with a European record, and founder of the synchronized swimming on the Balkan peninsula, and our grandmother, the first Bulgarian athlete to become 4th in the Olympics in the history of the country, have definitely shaped our mentality when it comes to sports and have given us a great example of how a true champion should practice, act and win. In addition, our father, a former professional soccer player and grandfather, the ex-coach of the national cycling team of France and the coach of our grandmother, have also helped shape our identity, determination and skill set to constantly perform on a high level. Background history: We started playing tennis at the age of four and haven’t stopped ever since. After competing professionally in juniors, we decided to go to the states and compete at a collegiate level. We played for Murray State University and Saint Louis University, where we won two conference championships. After college, we moved to Miami because we found jobs in Citi bank as business analysts for a year. We decided that corporate America is not really for us, at least at this stage of our lives. Therefore, we decided to go back to playing tennis professionally.
We have achieved a lot of things in the field of tennis, and we can say that we are equally proud about all of them. Some of the highlights include more than 61 trophies and medals in singles and doubles. Also, this year we achieved our highest ranking and are currently top 10 doubles and top 15 singles WTA players in Bulgaria and have two runners up titles. However, what we are really proud of and fortunate to have, are the different opportunities that tennis has given us. Because of tennis we were able to work with some of the biggest sports brands and go on all paid trips around the world. Some of the off-court accomplishments include Visiting the Roland Garros with Lacoste, shooting with one of the best creative directors that has worked with Nike, Off-White, etc. Also, being in a campaign for one of the best Bulgarian brands – Flair and being all over the malls around the country.
Also, during quarantine, we started our own business. Currently we own a wellness and recovery company called Vèd. We are one of the top selling brands in eastern Europe and in Miami. Our most popular product is our CBD muscle gel, which helps with all types of injuries. Our gel has no THC, is allowed for professional athletes, and has one of the highest contents of CBD on the market. You can read more about us on our website www.cbdved.com

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Being a professional athlete makes you show resilience day in and day out. We need to wake up early every morning and go to bed early every night in order to get the ultimate quality sleep so that our bodies can recover well. We need to eat clean food and practice 4 hours a day, every day along with 1 hour of either gym or running every day. We need to meet with sports psychologist and develop our mentality, we need to do recovery which includes ice baths, massages, stretching and so on. We need to travel to a different city and country almost every week. When we are home, we cannot go out and party and if you do, you will be dead on practice the next day. Overall, to be an athlete you need to show extreme dedication and resilience every day. Still, here is a short story from one of our tournaments that we really had to show resilience to survive. For the purpose of the story, we will refer to us as twin 1 and twin 2.
The tournament held place in Mexico, and it was the first tournament for us after juniors and our first time in Mexico. Apart from the fact that we took the longest flight to Mexico possible (7hours) from Miami, upon arrival our flight got delayed and we missed the in person sign in for our tournament. For those of you not familiar with how a tennis tournament works- you need to sign in in person for singles to enter the draw. So yes, when we arrived at the tournament site and the organizers confirmed that we missed the sign in for singles, our hearts sank, because we spent so much time energy and resources to get there. Luckily, we still had time to sign in for the doubles tournament and we got in! Happy from the mini win, we went to a local restaurant with one of our tennis friends. She said the restaurant is amazing and we need to try it. Of course, we got food poising and one of us got it so bad that we had to go to the emergency room. The doctors gave us some medicine to make it through the night because we had our doubles match on the next day. Somehow, we made it through the match and actually played decent, but lost in a third set. When we got back to our hotel room twin 2 started to uncontrollably shake. We were all alone so twin 1 had to run to the gas station and get all electrolytes possible and heat up her sister with a massage, 5 blankets and a blow drier. Turned out twin 2 suffered a heat stroke from being already severely dehydrated from the food poisoning coupled with playing a long match in the Mexican summer heat. That was definitely challenging for both of us and we had to show a lot of resilience to go through it all alone in a foreign country, but we learned a lot.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

We believe a lot of people think that being a professional tennis player is the dream. You get to travel all over the world and do what you love most, which is indeed very nice. However, there is a lot of behind the scenes that is not shown. There is always the fear of unpredictable injury which can leave you jobless. There is all the hard work that you need to put every day and sometimes even that is not enough. You need to stay mentally strong and keep believing in yourself even if you are having bad luck on tournaments or you are playing bad. There is also politics as in every other sport. Some players get priority simply because they play for a bigger country. Smaller countries can very rarely hold big tournaments and prioritize their players because they do not have the budget to hold one. Lastly, professional tennis is a very very expensive sport. So before considering becoming a professional tennis player, you need to prepare all of your savings and be ready to sacrifice it constantly in the name of your dream. You need money for equipment (tennis racquets, tennis shoes, apparel), you need money to pay coaches (tennis coach, running coach, sports psychologist), you need money for recovery ( spa days, professional sports massages) and of course you need money to travel (airfare, hotels, food). Maybe you are asking yourselves why do we keep doing it? Because it’s our dream and because one good season can change your life completely. You just need to keep believing in yourself and stay consistent, as with every big dream.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.cbdved.com
• Instagram: twinsofmiami
• Facebook: @vedwellness

Image Credits
@raul_tutiven @anthonyfoudil @nine.ex @ninaporonik @bobjoyarchitect