US Open winner Aryna Sabalenka says the plethora of appearances ahead of grand slams make it difficult to focus on the tennis.
Outsiders may assume that in a build-up to a major tournament, the world’s best players have their feet up in order to have the energy needed for a two-week endurance test but the World No.1 has revealed that the week before a Grand Slam is spent doing anything but.
“We have tournaments that lead to the Grand Slam and then you have a week before the Grand Slam where you come to the place where you’re going to compete, and you practice training, but also you have a lot of like brands, dinners, meetings, some interviews as well,” she said on the Jay Shetty Podcast.
“So people don’t know that before the Grand Slam, there is a really busy week full of meetings, dinners, and this, this kind of stuff, which is also not easy to handle and also your training during that period, and then the tournament starts.
“There is another pressure, which we deal with, but the preparation it’s all about physically, there is tennis, there’s gym, there’s fitness, all of this stuff. But also mentally, you’re preparing yourself for really tough two weeks, two weeks of great tennis hopefully, because you never know, but also two weeks of fighting. Fighting for your dream and mentally, you have this constant conversation in your head, like ‘you’re gonna do that. You’re capable of it. You’re strong enough.’
“I feel like if someone would hear my conversation in my head throughout this three-week period, they would think that ‘okay, there’s something wrong with this person’ because it’s a constant conversation.”
Sabalenka also spoke of how she got into tennis and it was only due to an encounter of her father and a court that she began on a path that would lead to her becoming World No.1.
“He was just trying to find some activity for me, because I was a very active kid, and he wanted me to be busy and to do stuff, and he was trying to find a sport for me,” she recalled.
“And he was just passing by the tennis court. He was like ‘well, why not just try it?’ So I tried it, and I loved it, and that’s how it started.
“He used to play ice hockey, but then he had a bike crash, so he was afraid to come back to sport. It was quite a bad injury, he barely survived when he was 18 or 19, so since then, he didn’t want to come back to sport because he was afraid that it would affect his health.”
