Emma Raducanu: I'm having acupuncture to be fit – but I'm really scared of needles!

Telegraph

24-05-2025

Emma Raducanu is using acupuncture in an attempt to regain full fitness before Monday's French Open meeting with Wang Xinyu – despite the fact that she has a phobia of needles.
Raducanu suffered a back spasm last week in Strasbourg, and told reporters in Paris that she is not yet 100 per cent recovered. The only positive is that the injury feels less debilitating than the similar spasm she suffered in December, which left her unable to train for weeks.
'I would say the one before Australia was worse,' Raducanu explained. 'I feel like this one I kind of caught before it fully locked up. So I think the treatment is a lot of it with the physios, a lot of it with heat. Been doing some needling.
'At the start of the year I was so scared of needles. It was my biggest phobia. That was the only way I was going to be able to play Australia. So since then, I've been kind of dipping my toes into it because I know it helps, even though I'm really scared of them. That's how I've been trying to manage it.'
Needles happened to be the focus of conversation in the Roland Garros interview rooms on Saturday. Shortly before Raducanu came in, the former US Open champion Naomi Osaka had described a 5am call from anti-doping operatives that very morning, adding that she often suffers bruising to her arms because her veins are so hard to find,
Raducanu sympathised with Osaka's position, saying: 'Sometimes it feels like Pin the Donkey because at 6am you're not very hydrated. It's like you can't get any blood out, and they have however many attempts.
'That's a bit difficult, but I think we all have to go through it. It's not the most enjoyable thing, but it's just part of what we have to do. I was very scared the first few times, but you obviously don't have a choice. They penalise you if you don't do it pretty badly, so I kind of built up my tolerance that way.'
As for Raducanu's recurring fitness issues, she explained that she has an ongoing weakness which relates to a lack of curvature in the lumbar spine. 'I think with the way my back is structured, I'm more prone to picking things up,' she said, 'especially on clay.'
Yet she has not opted for any pain-killing injections, as these might cover up short-term issues at the expense of further problems down the line.
Asked whether she felt that players sometimes ignore pain to their own lasting detriment, Raducanu agreed. 'We always push on through because there's no real breaks in the season,' she said. 'So it does kind of hurt us sometimes because we'll probably do some more damage.
'I know from personal experience with my wrists, I was struggling for seven months with them before I ended up having surgery. I just kept pushing through because people were telling me I wasn't tough enough. When in reality I knew there was pain, and I knew it felt like more than just soreness.
'So I wish I would have listened to myself sooner. I would have saved myself maybe like eight months, 12 months of struggling. But I guess I can learn from that. Now I am a little bit more astute when it comes to what pain is manageable and what pain should be taken more seriously.'
On the subject of phobias, meanwhile, Raducanu said that her only other issue apart from needles relates to swimming in the sea. 'I'm not great in the water, to be honest, with what's underneath,' she explained with a laugh. 'I need goggles when I go swimming, but it's scary because I don't want to see it at the same time, what's under there. It's hard.'