Former No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki Resumes Her Career
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The former leader of the ranking of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), Dane Caroline Wozniacki announced her return to tennis after a pause of three and a half years and the birth of two children. The 32-year-old, who won the Australian Open in 2018 and has a total of 30 titles to her credit and earned more than $35 million in prize money, has already received a wild card from the organizers of the August WTA 1000 tournament in Montreal. After that, she plans to speak at the US Open.
The decision to return to tennis, Caroline Wozniacki, announced in a lengthy article published in the publication Vogue. There she noted that, having given birth to two children over the past three years, she still has goals in tennis that she would like to achieve. Wozniacki’s first tournament since her return will be the Omnium Banque Nationale presente par Rogers, the $2.7 million WTA 1000 event in Montreal in August, which she won in 2010. Its organizers have already promised the ex-champion a wild card. After that, Wozniacki is going to play at the US Open, where she reached the finals twice (2009, 2014). Further, the ex-first racket plans to pause until the Australian Open, and she calls the performance at the Paris Olympics a key goal.
Caroline Wozniacki’s statement has become one of the main tennis events of the week. We are talking about a tennis player who, from October 2010 to February 2018, led the WTA rating for 71 weeks in total (this is the tenth indicator in the history of the WTA), finished in first place for two seasons (2010, 2011) and in total difficulty won in singles 30 tournaments. True, for a very long time the Danish collection did not have a title won at the Grand Slam championships, but, having beaten the Romanian Simona Halep in the final of the Australian Open 2018, she filled this gap, and soon, after a six-year break, she even again became the first racket of the world.
Having earned $ 35.2 million in prize money during her career, the Dane ranks seventh in the history of women’s professional tennis according to this indicator. (It is interesting that she would now occupy exactly the same position in the men’s list).
In 2019, she married American basketball player David Lee, who played for several clubs in the National Basketball Association, in January 2020. announced about the end of her career, in June 2021 she gave birth to a daughter, and in October 2022, a son. After the end of the coronavirus pandemic, her family lives in Copenhagen.
Wozniacki is not the only ex-world number one who will try to combine performances with motherhood. Belgian Kim Clijsters announced her retirement not even once, but twice – in 2007 and 2012 – and twice, in 2010 and 2020, returned. At the same time, the first return of Clijsters turned out to be very successful. After him, she not only won three of her four Grand Slam titles, but also topped the world classification for one week in February 2011.
There are other examples as well. Currently, the 19th place in the WTA ranking is occupied by its former leader, 33-year-old Belarusian Victoria Azarenka, who has a six-year-old son. Shortly after the birth of her daughter, who was born in the fall of 2017, the famous American Serena Williams returned to the court, who then reached the Grand Slam finals four times. True, Azarenka never announced her retirement, and Williams did it was only last year and at the age of 41 she does not seem to intend to change her mind.
It is difficult to judge the real prospects of Caroline Wozniacki, who will turn 33 in July, for two reasons.
First, unlike the same Kim Clijsters, who preferred attacking tennis, she always adhered to a more viscous defensive style that places increased demands on endurance. Secondly, in October 2018, a Danish woman was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic inflammatory disease of the joints. However, now it is in remission.
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