Thanasi Kokkinakis's Last Bullet
After undergoing a new operation and being out for a year, the player is working to make a comeback in 2026: "I refused to keep playing in pain".
What has happened to Thanasi Kokkinakis? There are so many players up there that it's hard to keep track of all of them, until a moment comes where one disappears for a few months and we miss him. The Australian, for example, has not competed since the Australian Open, a tournament where he gave his all in the second round to fall in five sets against Jack Draper. Since then, nothing more was heard. Thanks to his recent appearance on a podcast, and the hard work of Ubitennis rescuing his statements, today we know the pain that the man from Adelaide has been enduring for years.
"It's a risk I decided to take, knowing that perhaps I wouldn't have another opportunity," explains the 29-year-old tennis player as he describes his last chest surgery. "No tennis player had ever undergone this type of surgery, so it was a very risky gamble. The complicated part, in a case like this, is that you can't compare yourself to anyone else, so you can only hope. It was an operation more unique than rare, but I refused to continue doing the same as before, which was playing in pain. This is what I had to endure in recent years, so I wanted to take a risk to see how it would go," he admits resignedly, having touched the top 70 a couple of seasons ago.
"I played with a torn chest for much of the last four or five years. If I tried to win a long match, a best-of-five set match, or when I tried to play two matches in a row, my arm would swell and I couldn't play anymore. If I chose to continue, by sheer inertia of things, I would end up retiring in the end. I couldn't bear it anymore, I didn't want to go through winning a match and then having to retire. I wanted to try something new to see if the situation could improve, but the reality is that they removed a lot of scar tissue and cut half of my right pectoral. They grafted part of the Achilles tendon from a deceased donor to connect my torn pectoral to the shoulder," the oceanic reveals in great detail.
A DATE SET IN STONE
Fortunately, despite Kokkinakis' frequent visits to the operating room, his tremendous precocity reminds us that he still has some attempts ahead of him. Without yet reaching 30, more than age, the problem here lies in the resistance of a physique tremendously punished by injuries and surgeries. The Australian, however, does not intend to give up, although his suitcase of confidence also does not have unlimited lives. His goal is to return to the same place he left off: the Australian tour in January. This is how he counts the days, turning over calendar pages and hoping that this upcoming return could be the definitive one.
"Now I'm feeling good, I returned to the courts a couple of weeks ago, started training seriously, and my groundstrokes were almost at 100%. The most complicated part is the serve, that's what I'm working on the most to recover it, we'll see. My goal is to return to the circuit in 2026, I'm enjoying this moment, the restart from scratch, playing without pain, something I could almost never do in my career. Mentally I'm fine, although if I couldn't return by early 2026, in the middle of the Australian tour, it would be very difficult to digest," emphasizes the right-hander.
This is an automatic translation. You can read the original news, La última bala de Thanasi Kokkinakis