By Chris Oddo | Tuesday, January 5, 2016
The WTA's top players haven't had much to smile about in the fist week of the season as injuries have wreaked havoc on the tour.
Photo Source: Alex Goodlett/Getty
Injuries are wreaking havoc on the WTA’s first week of the season and the week is not even half over. Already five of the WTA’s top six players have been forced out of action due to injury.
It’s a bad omen and the continuation of a trend that we saw late in 2015 when Serena Williams pulled the plug on her season in September as Maria Sharapova struggled to get healthy. There was also Eugenie Bouchard, who succumbed to post-concussion syndrome and ended her season with a lawsuit against the USTA.
Is it just tough luck or is the tour simply too rigorous for the game’s top stars, who play week in and week out, many times multiple days and weeks consecutively?
Are we seeing the inconvenient nexus of a sport that has become too physical and a schedule that has become too demanding? Or has the tour just hit a stretch of bad luck? Either way it will be something to keep an eye on as the season progresses.
For now, all we can do is try and take stock of who is suffering from what so that we may make some sense of what their hopes are as the tour moves forward to the first—and most grueling—Grand Slam of the year in less than two weeks in Melbourne.
THE DOCTOR'S OFFICE
21-time major champion Williams, the defending champ at the Australian Open, is dealing with knee inflammation and had to retire from her match during the second set at Hopman Cup on Tuesday (a day after opting out of her first match). She insists she’ll be good to go in a matter of days. But Williams has not played a tour-level match since falling to Roberta Vinci at the U.S. Open last September. How has it come to this?
Simona Halep, the top seed at Brisbane, was forced out of the draw with swelling and soreness in her left achilles tendon. The Romanian says she dealt with the injury some last season and hopes to compete next week in Sydney.
Sharapova, who only played three events after Wimbledon last season, strained her left forearm and pulled out of Brisbane, saying she hopes to be ready for Melbourne. The five-time major champion missed last year’s U.S. Open with a right leg injury after pulling out of Cincinnati and saying she hoped to be fine for New York. Hopefully the forearm injury is nowhere near as serious.
Petra Kvitova, who battled mono all of last season, but finished the season like a warrior, pulled out of Shenzhen on Tuesday with a stomach ailment. She says the sickness is not related to mono, and she plans to play Sydney next week.
Third-ranked Garbine Muguruza pulled out of her first match of the year early in the second set with a worrying injury to her left foot. Here's what she had to say:
Is that all? Unfortunately, no. Sam Stosur is undergoing an MRI on her right wrist, which bothered her during her three-set loss to Carla Suarez Navarro in Brisbane on Tuesday. Ajla Tomljanovic had to pull out of doubles in Brisbane after an ab strain (actually caused by playing with a shoulder strain) forced her out. She hopes to be well after some rest. Irina-Camelia Begu retired in the second set of her match vs. Anna Lena Friedsam in Shenzhen.
If there's a bright side in all of this its that Canada's Bouchard played through her first full match since suffering a concussion in a freak accident at the U.S. Open. She has reached the quarterfinals in a WTA event for the first time since last January.
The takeaway? Tennis is a tough game, and perhaps even tougher is rounding the bend from the off-season to the regular season. Ideally, players like to have an intensified training block that allows them to build a training base that could last them through this first grueling segment of the season. But it surely can’t be easy putting the finishing touches on a lung-searing, muscle-taxing training block at a time when much of the world is celebrating the holidays at ski resorts and whooping it up to commemorate the new year. Tennis turns the page fast on its outcoming season faster than any other sport, ringing in the new with a grind in Australia that is not for the meek.
It’s been a tough beginning for the WTA Tour. The question is, should we be concerned about the well-being of the athletes, or should we be thankful that it hasn’t been worse?