I was tennis world number one and friends with Diego Maradona, now I’m unrecognisable after bulking up and getting tattoos
Marcelo Rios was one of the more colourful characters on the tennis scene during the 1990s and early 2000s.
He has been retired for nearly 20 years now, but has completely changed his appearance and physique since then.
The Chilean was a former world number one and Australian Open finalist in 1998, losing out to Petr Korda.
He also holds the accolade of being the shortest person to hold the status as best in the world… not shortest in time but height as he stands at just 5ft9in.
Not only was Rios entertaining on the court, he made even more headlines off the court for his antics.
He was arrested in 2001 in Rome for punching a taxi driver on the nose and then got into a fight with a policeman.
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Then in 2003 he was thrown out of a hotel while on Davis Cup duty for Chile for allegedly urinating on some men and then swimming naked in the pool. An incident he later apologised for.
As recently as 2018, he was fined by the ITF for telling journalists at the Davis Cup: "As my personal friend Diego Maradona says, I never speak to reporters as you can all suck it."
However, he looks completely unrecognisable from how he looked as a player.
Not only has he clearly been hitting the gym since he retired, he also underwent a number of cosmetic surgeries and had plenty of tattoos.
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He said in an interview: “I fixed my forehead, which was very damaged by the sun. Back in the days nobody used sunscreen, so my face got destroyed.
“Also, they fixed my eyelid, which was too short. I couldn’t close my eye so I slept with my eyes open. I had bags and wrinkles.”
Rios also follows a bodybuilder's lifestyle where he revealed he trains for hours a day.
Now he has bulked up to well over 100kg, up from his listed playing weight of 73kg.
On his new regime, he said: “I’m training to feel good. Two and a half hours a day to gain muscle mass. I never fail. Before, as a pro player, I had to lose weight, but I’m not at the age to go up and down anymore.”
Now at 47, he resides in Miami and had in 2014 revealed he had been diagnosed with Asperger’s.