How tennis players manage a rapid rise, fall and the climb back after injury or loss of form

New York Times

3 days ago

ROLAND GARROS, PARIS — They are everywhere in tennis these days.
Flying up the rankings not so long ago, ready to take over the sport. Now they are in their mid-20s, a combination of chastened and determined, embarking on the next quest — one a little different from that first, carefree rise.
On Wednesday, Americans Amanda Anisimova and Reilly Opelka and Stefanos Tsitsipas of Greece all took their turns on the comeback trail, with Anisimova leading the way.
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Anisimova was a semifinalist here in 2019, when she was just 17 and tennis felt like an ever-upward adventure. That was before her father and coach, Konstantine, died of a heart attack at 52. That grief, injuries, and disillusionment with the toll of professional tennis led her to take an extended break from the sport.
Her journey carried her to the top 25 in her teens, then brought her down to the 400s. Now, she is surging once more, with a career high of No. 16.
On Thursday, Denis Shapovalov of Canada and Alejandro Davidovich Fokina of Spain, two flashy players with occasional magic in their hands that has sent them up and down and now back up the ladder, were trying to turn their runs of bad luck or bad health or bad decisions, or even a combination of all three, into something positive. So were Sofia Kenin and Markéta Vondroušová, two Grand Slam champions finding a new way, as Anisimova has done better than just about anyone out there this year.
'I think back then when I was younger, there just wasn't much pressure and everything was kind of new to me,' Anisimova said in an interview Wednesday following her 6-0, 6-2 win against Viktorija Golubic on Court 14, the fourth-choice assignment at Roland Garros. She said there is an upside to the roller coaster quality of her career.
'I've played on all these big stages and I can trust my game,' she said.
'It's more about the experience and trying to take that with me and use that to my advantage.'
Davidovich Fokina and Vondroušová neatly encapsulated the difficulty of the second rise. Davidovich Fokina, who has beaten then-world No. 5 Jack Draper and pushed world No. 3 Alexander Zverev and No. 2 Carlos Alcaraz this clay season, fell to Jiří Lehečka in four, mostly one-sided sets despite threatening a comeback. Vondroušová took the first set against Poland's Magdalena Fręch 6-0, lost the second, but emerged victorious in the third.
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For most players, pursuing a tennis career isn't like climbing the corporate ladder. There are fits and spurts, peaks and valleys, burnout, injuries and a host of other challenges. Most often, tennis is about falling and rising back up again. Learning from what happened and applying those lessons to what comes next is just as important as adding a couple of extra miles per hour to a first serve.
The art of the tennis comeback can involve radical and organic alterations.
Davidovich Fokina changed just about everything — his coach, his fitness trainer, his physiotherapist, his agent, his daily routines, his attitude. He even moved out of his lifelong home in Málaga, Spain, to Monaco, choosing the opportunity to practice with the best players in the world (Jannik Sinner, Zverev, Grigor Dimitrov, occasionally Novak Djokovic) over hang time with his posse.
During an interview in Rome this month, Davidovich Fokina said that he was in his 'comfort zone' in Málaga.
'It took me a couple of years since I started in ATP to realize what I want to do with my life, what I want to do with myself, with everything,' he said.
He said he has plenty of regrets. He wishes he had moved to Monaco or Dubai sooner, or spent some time there to see how differently the best players lived and trained. On the practice court, he said he brings purpose to every drill and every ball.
In matches, he has cut out the silly stuff – no more wild attempts at winners from 10 feet behind the baseline. No more underarm serves at 8-8 in a fifth-set tiebreak against Holger Rune at Wimbledon. Davidovich Fokina is trying to emulate players who come to the court with patience and without anxiety.
'If I'm relaxed, playing solid, I can play aggressive but not like crazy,' he said.
Some tennis reorgs go better than others.
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Tsitsipas has changed just about everything, too. That involved firing his father, who had been his coach for a decade, and switching from a Wilson to a Babolat racket and then back again to Wilson when the Babolat racket didn't produce for him on clay the way it did on hard courts. The 2021 French Open and 2023 Australian Open finalist is down to No. 25 in the rankings. He lost Wednesday to the world No. 167, Matteo Gigante of Italy, in four sets, struggling to hit his once lethal backhand much beyond the service line on points he had to win.
'It's a constant puzzle,' Tsitsipas said in his news conference. 'Things have definitely changed over the last couple of years, and I am in a completely different position now.
'I just need to use my experience a little bit more wisely. My experience sometimes kind of stabs me.'
Several players trying to climb back up the mountain struggle with the false memory of themselves. They imagine that they were once a perfect player.
'I'm not the same guy that I was seven years ago,' said Shapovalov, who is 26 and has been working his way back from a knee injury for more than a year and a half. 'Physically, tennis-wise, everything.'
Shapovalov didn't make many radical shifts. He spent last year chasing rankings points, skipping the Olympics in Paris because the tournament didn't offer any points and it was on clay, his worst surface. Better to get a jump on the North American hard-court swing in Washington, D.C. and be ready to go for his home Masters 1,000.
Opelka, who was No. 17 in 2022 before two wrist surgeries, is in the same boat, strategically using his protected ranking entries into the tournaments that will help him optimize his ranking. He's 11-9 on the year and has gone up 200 spots, but at No. 93, is still far from where he wants to be.
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'Once you have one surgery on your wrist, let alone two, you're never going to be the same player,' he said. 'You're pretty much done.'
Opelka, a big server who is nearly 7 foot, said he just wants to stick around long enough to see if he has anything left. He lost Wednesday to Mariano Navone of Argentina.
'If it's anything like this, it won't last long. I didn't play tennis to be the 90th best player in the world,' he said.
Neither did Shapovalov. He's seeded 27th at this French Open. A year ago, he was ranked No 118. Like Anisimova, he's found that, having made the climb once before, his blood pressure doesn't rise the way it once did when the big tests come.
'I don't get as anxious as I used to early in my career,' he said.
Kenin, the Australian Open champion in 2020 and a finalist here that year, is getting back to that spot, too.
She won so often at 21 that she didn't think the ride would ever end. Then it did, and she didn't know how to make it stop as she fell into the 400s. She's up to No. 30 now and faces Victoria Azarenka Thursday. She didn't have a plan to deal with the decline. It took a while to come to terms with having to work harder on the practice court and in the gym.
'You're not always going to be a tennis player, so obviously it's for your future as well,' Kenin, 26, said in Paris.
Vondroušová, the 2023 Wimbledon champion, had thought that future had arrived for her. Last year, she couldn't swing a tennis racket after surgery on her shoulder. She would try to play. The pain would return. Another surgery wasn't an option.
She had spent hours in the gym doing physical therapy without the payoff of actually playing tennis.
'It's not fun,' said Vondroušová, also 25. 'I had to be very patient.'
Three months ago, she got a dog, an Italian greyhound named Milo. That helped, and the payoff finally came Tuesday, when she played and won her first Grand Slam match in a year. At this point, just being able to compete without intense pain feels like the biggest payoff, though Thursday's upset of Fręch in the second round was a nice bonus.
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'Very surprised,' said the woman who was on an operating table nine months ago, when everyone else was playing the U.S. Open.
There was a bit of discomfort in her shoulder, and when the match got tight in the third set, she wasn't sure if she'd remember how to compete under pressure. She told herself that's what she came to Paris for and to forget about how exhausted she was.
'That's what you cannot get in practice,' she said. 'I was like, 'OK, let's try, you know to do it this way.' You need those matches.'
Vondroušová said she and her physio tweaked their routine with more stretching and less stress. If something hurts, they stop doing it. The health of the body is everything.
That's about where Anisimova is, after managing back pain in recent months and, for the first time, hiring a full-time physiotherapist. It's not anything she had to worry about when she was a teen phenom.
'It's just part of learning and adjusting how to manage certain things and when to take time off,' she said.
'You're always trying to figure out how to stay on top.'
(Top photo of Markéta Vondroušová: Alain Jocard / AFP via Getty Images)