THE EX-WIFE of former Real Madrid midfielder Christian Karembeu has just given birth to her first child at the age of 46.
Slovakian Adriana Karembeu – née Sklenaříková – a medical student-turned-model with joint French citizenship who dated Simply Red's Mick Hucknell for three years before marrying Christian and taking his surname – has announced the safe arrival of Nina, weighing 3.3 kilos (7lb 4oz) at the Princesse-Grace Hospital in Monaco.
If she had still been married to Christian and living in Spain, she would form part of the one in five mums in the country who have their first child past the age of 40.
Spain's average childbearing age is rapidly climbing – seven in 10 women aged 35 do not have children, even though they would like to, and it is mainly foreign women of Latin American, eastern European and Moroccan origin who skew the mean age for a first baby down to 32.
Adriana was married to Karembeu between 1998 and 2013; the couple wed a year after Christian, from New Caledonia – north-east of Australia near Fiji and Vanuatu – was signed up by Real Madrid, where he played until Middlesborough FC took him on in 2000.
He retired from the sport in 2005.
Adriana remarried in 2014, to Armenian businessman Aram Ohanian, and they have tried to start a family before.
When Adriana was 44, she had a miscarriage at seven weeks.
“In the months that followed, I couldn't look at a pregnant woman or a woman with a baby without my eyes filling with tears,” the Paris Match and Victoria's Secret model told the magazine Ici Paris in an interview in 2016.
“My husband and I will try once more to become parents and, if that fails, we'll start trying to adopt.”
But Voici magazine revealed in July that Adriana, who has lived in Paris since the 1990s, was pregnant again with the help of IVF.
Proof that there is not necessarily any rush to get pregnant in your 20s or 30s, Adriana admits that her desire to have a child is very recent as she never really thought about it when she was at the 'right' age.
“I just wasn't ready for it when I was younger,” she told Télé Loisirs in October.
More recently, in January, whilst accompanying intrepid explorer Mike Horn through the Anapurna massif in the Himalayas for a TV programme aired on channel M6, Adriana said: “It's never too late; there are many ways. I have a great career, but in your 40s you tend to stop and weigh things up. The dream of starting a family will be magnificent.”
Despite the July report in Voici, Adriana did not confirm her pregnancy publicly until March, when photographs of her started appearing on her Instagram account – including the one shown above - at various stages of gestation.
Her age meant her pregnancy and labour were high-risk – in fact, women past their mid-30s are considered geriatrics in terms of motherhood, for medical purposes – but it went smoothly and baby Nina is completely healthy.
