Krejcikova recounts her drama: "I don't know if I will play again without pain"

Perhaps more than one has not noticed, maybe two months of the season are few, but the truth is that out of the entire top 40 female players, there is only one player who has not yet played a single match this season. And she is not just any player. It is Barbora Krejcikova, a two-time Grand Slam champion and currently ranked number 16. In an interview with Sport CZ, the 29-year-old Czech explains without delving too deeply into the moment she felt her body no longer responded, and most importantly, how much she is concerned about a pain that has been accompanying her longer than usual.

"Recovery is not as fast as I expected, that's true, but I am doing everything possible to return as soon as possible. I wonder if I will ever be completely free of pain again, right now it is a situation that stresses me quite a bit," confesses the champion of the 2021 French Open and the 2024 Wimbledon. A player who, although she was never consistently at the top, always knew how to find those moments within each calendar to reach her peak performance and expand her impressive list of achievements.

The last we heard from her, at least in terms of sports, was her participation in the recent WTA Finals, where she qualified among the top eight thanks to the title she won in London. Despite pushing herself to the limit, the player from Brno was able to leave Riyadh with her head held high after making it through the Round Robin and falling in the semifinals against Zheng, but that was simply the final effort of a body that arrived in Saudi Arabia with the reserve tank already on.

"It was during the summer when everything started to go wrong, transitioning from grass to clay is one of the most challenging tasks, and we had very little time to do it," Barbora recalls about how she faced the Olympic event in Paris. "I remember that the first day it rained, on the second, there was heat, and I played in the afternoon with the hottest weather, as well as long matches. I noticed this the next day when my strength quickly began to diminish. After the first match, my head was spinning and I had cramps, I didn't feel well at all," asserts Krejcikova, who, despite everything, has no regrets.

TOLL OF THE OLYMPIC GAMES

There were several who criticized Jannik Sinner for skipping these Olympic Games in Paris, although seeing the results the Italian achieved in the last quarter of the year, they could better understand his decision. Does an extreme surface change in the middle of the season entail so much danger? To us journalists, it seemed like a low-risk plan, but cases like that of Barbora Krejcikova demonstrate that the players always have more knowledge than any of us, which is why we should respect their roadmap without objection.

"It was a very important event, representing my country, which was very important to me," the Czech values ​​the extra effort she tried to put into the Olympic event, also in two disciplines. "I couldn't tell Katerina (Siniakova) that I wouldn't play, that was impossible, even if we had to fail in the early matches... which is what eventually happened. I guess I'm starting to get a little older, that I will have to gradually limit my participation in doubles, where I need to start being a little more selective," concludes a woman who, to this day, still doesn't know when her back will allow her to return to competition.

This is an automatic translation. You can read the original news, Krejcikova relata su drama: “No sé si volveré a jugar sin dolor”