Athina Onassis

Athina Hélène Onassis-Miranda
Born	(1985-01-29) January 29, 1985 Neuilly-sur-Seine
Spouse	Alvaro Alfonso de Miranda Neto
Parent(s)	Thierry Roussel and Christina Onassis

Athina Hélène Onassis-Miranda (née Athina Roussel, born January 29, 1985) is a competitive show jumper who is the only surviving descendant of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Her middle name has been the subject of some confusion over the years. Before the photos of her wedding invitations in 2005, it was believed that her middle name could either be Christina or Alexandra. However, the wedding invitations clearly stated her birth name as Athina Hélène Roussel. She added the family name, Onassis, in 2008 to honor her grandfather and mother.

Early life and family

Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, she is the only child of Christina Onassis (1950-1988) and her fourth husband, Thierry Roussel, a French pharmaceutical heir. Born Athina Roussel, she has used alternately, for equestrian competitions, the names of Athina Onassis de Miranda and Athina Miranda Onassis since her December 2005 marriage to fellow equestrian Álvaro Affonso de Miranda Neto.

She was born 12 years after the death of her uncle Alexander, 14 years after the death of grandmother Tina, almost exactly a decade after the death of grandfather Aristotle, and was just three years old when mother Christina died. After her mother's death, she was raised by her father and his second wife, Marianne "Gaby" Landhage, a Swedish model who had been Roussel's longtime mistress and by whom he already had two children, one of them born during Roussel's marriage with Christina.

For her early education, she attended state schools in Lausanne that follow the French model for secondary education. She finished her Baccalauréat course in the summer of 2003.

Roussel has three half-siblings:

• Erik Christopher Roussel (born July 1985)
• Sandrine Roussel (born May 1987)
• Johanna Roussel (born July 1991)

Personal fortune

The extent of her inheritance is the subject of much argument. Sources never seem to agree on whether she has US $600 million, or $800m, or even as much as some $2 billion. One cause for confusion is the media's tendency to blur the line of distinction between what she owns and what the Onassis Foundation owns.

In 1999, at the age of 14, she said in court documents she felt "great aversion to anything Greek", even though her maternal grandfather was of Greek descent. He was born, however, in what is now Turkey in the city of Izmir--historically known in the West as Smyrna (its ancient Greek name)--then a part of the Ottoman Empire.

Legal entanglements

Christina Onassis never trusted Thierry Roussel completely, which led the family to arrange for a Board of Administrators to have control over the family money until she came of age. During her childhood and adolescence, all expenses made on her behalf by her father (using money from the Onassis inheritance) had to be approved by the Board in advance (which led her father to threaten constantly to move back to Paris, France with the family, where income taxes would cost the estate a "small fortune a year", as Roussel put it). In 1999, a Vaduz court ordered the transfer of management of her inheritance from the five trustees selected by her mother to the KPMG Fides auditing firm in Lucerne.

On her 18th birthday, she was of legal age to take control of half of her inheritance. On her 21st birthday, she did not take control of the other half or become the president of the Onassis Foundation, with assets in excess of US$2.1 billion. The Foundation's Board has made public that they have no interest in turning over control to Athina, whom they say has no real qualifications to take on the role. Moreover, the Onassis Foundation officially denies that she ever was an heir to the estate of Aristotle Onassis; they acknowledge her only as heiress to her mother's fortune.

The Board has arranged to modify the Statutes of the Foundation so that Athina would not become head of the Foundation automatically upon completing 21 years of age. Her lawyers contested the validity of the changes and promised to fight for her stated desire to be President of the Foundation as of January 2006, when she turned 21.

Stelios Papadimitriou, president of the foundation, has remarked: "We are not going to turn Onassis Foundation over to someone who has no connection with our culture, our religion, our language or our shared experiences, and who never went to college or worked a day in her life. She can do whatever she wants with what she inherited from her mother, but not with Onassis's legacy to the Greek people in memory of Alexander Onassis [Onassis-Miranda's uncle]." Under the terms of her grandfather's will, his fortune was divided in two, with half going to set up a Vaduz-based charitable foundation in memory of his only son, Alexander, who was killed in a plane crash.

Personal life

Since she started dating Brazilian professional showjumper (and two-time Olympic medalist) Álvaro Miranda Neto, more commonly known as "Doda", in March 2003, Athina moved to São Paulo, in Brazil, where the couple now lives. They paid $8.6-million for a 10,600-square-foot duplex, with space for 15 cars and overlooking Ibirapuera Park.

Doda Miranda previously was married to Cibele Dorsa, a Brazilian model, when he and Athina Roussel, as she then was called, met. Doda and his wife had been separated around the time Roussel joined the show jumping training school where Miranda trained. A romance and a divorce ensued, with Cibele Dorsa remarking on the new couple, "She can buy him horses and I can't .... He exchanged me for Athina's money... and a few more millions for the kidney pie onion... "

Marriage

Roussel and Miranda were married on December 3, 2005, after which it is believed that she assumed a hybrid version of the Onassis and Miranda names, thus apparently dropping the Roussel name. The bride's father and stepmother were not at the ceremony, though her half-sister Sandrine Roussel was invited.

Some anecdotes of the wedding were the consumption of 1000 bottles of champagne (around one per person), the electronic samba rhythms Athina and Doda selected for their wedding, where they danced until the morning. The couple had around 10 witnesses, most of them Brazilian horse-riders friends of the couple. Athina and Doda decided not to publish photos of the wedding (as they were going to do) after a television report some days before the wedding about the tragic death of Athina's mother. The couple reportedly asked for no presents and asked their guests to donate the money intended for presents to charity.

Onassis-Miranda has one stepchild, Viviane de Miranda e Dorsa.

Equestrian career

More recently, Onassis-Miranda has been trying to reach out to the Greek trustees. She has expressed an interest in learning Greek and has renewed her Greek passport. She also hopes to be on the Greek equestrian team at the next Olympics.

Their plans were to stay in São Paulo, which caused Nelson Pessoa, the captain of the Brazilian Equestrian Team, to regret publicly that Doda Miranda has forsaken his international career, and (informally) call upon the shipping heiress's influence on him, to persuade her then-fiancé to return to Europe and compete there. Lately, as her interest in competing in the 2008 Summer Olympics grew, the couple announced that they would return to Belgium to train following their honeymoon.

The Mirandas have since been training with Nelson Pessoa in Belgium, where they have many horses and where Doda Miranda's daughter, Viviane, is enrolled in a private school in Brussels.