Could Paula Badosa have imagined such a scenario? The Spaniard has a meeting, Thursday January 23, in the semi-finals of the Australian Open, with the Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka, world number 1 and title holder. This match at the top, the 27-year-old player almost never played it: falling at 140e world ranking in May, she was thinking of giving up tennis.
In question: a stress fracture in the spine, which occurred during the Rome tournament in May 2023. An injury which took her away from the courts for ten months, from which she had difficulty recovering and to which came s ‘add inflammation to the joints. To be able to continue playing, Paula Badosa had to resort to massive cortisone injections, which required special authorization from the WTA, the body which governs the professional women’s circuit, because such treatment is normally prohibited.
But the Spaniard managed, little by little, to climb back up, until reaching the quarter-finals of the US Open last summer. THE « plus beau come-back » of the year 2024, greeted the WTA. His companion since 2023, the Greek tennis player Stefanos Tsitsipas, wrote in December on the social network X: “My dear Paula, you have worked so hard and shown such resilience to become a top player again (…) I couldn’t be more proud of you. »
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