Dinara Safina abandons tennis, indefinitely

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Wilson Blade 9

Dinara Safina is sick of dealing with her back pain and announced that she doesn’t want to play tennis and has no idea when she will be ready to get back to competition. Interestingly, only three days ago Safina tweeted how her next tournament would be Roland Garros.

The situation has apparently changed and Safina’s statement is pretty illustrative of how tired she is of dealing with injury problems:

I don’t know how long my time out is going to last. I don’t want to torture myself and my body anymore. I’m just tired of constant questions from my coach in training, ‘How is your back? Can you do this exercise?’ I’m just tired of fighting with myself. At the moment I can’t do anything tennis-wise. When I can do certain moves without feeling lots of pain, then I would consider resuming my training. Right now I don’t care when I might return – this summer during the American hardcourt series, towards the end of the season or next year. I’ll take as much time as I need.

The 25-year-old Russian is just one of a series of former world No.1s who have not been present on the WTA Tour for an extended period. While Venus Williams and Kim Clijsters are still marked as questionable for the approaching French Open, Serena Williams will certainly skip it, according to the latest news. (source: BBC, photos by our reader Tony)

7 COMMENTS

  1. o man… that is not good. that is really not good at all. SHe was such a fighter. How can she give up so easily???? I wish her a really quick recovery and really hope to see her soon back on court winning tournaments…. she used to be one of my favourite players….

    and yup serena has announced official withdrawl from the FO 2011.

  2. Dinara did not give up easily. She has been injured for about 20 months now and has done everything possible to heal her body in order to play tennis. Nothing worked. Her only chance now is to stop training for a lnog time and see if her back will heal.

    Safina really has the desire, but her body has let her down.

  3. Bravo Dinara for your honesty, take as much time off to heal as you need. I also like what Del Potro said a few days ago when announcing his recent injury, he said he did not want to rush into the tournament at Roland Garros if he was not fit, saying: “I’ll respect the recovery time, what the doctors say”.

    Venus, being not match fit yet, pulled out of Brussels . Kimmie had already withdrawn from the Brussels Open (her country’s own tourney) due to her ankle injury and may miss RG. These strong players won’t be bullied by critics etc to come back before they’re ready.

    Caro injured her ankle in Charleston last year but came back to the tour sooner than she was ready in order not to lose ranking points “I gotta play. Those are the rules,” says Caroline Wozniacki to Ekstra Bladet. It is not the first time that Caroline Wozniacki has criticized the WTA for not considering the health of the players. She was unhappy that she as a top 10 player was forced to enter certain tournaments so as not to be punished in ranking.

    “Let me put it this way, I would have made some other rules. Some who took more account of players’ health.”

  4. Safina is right, it’ better for her to relax and finally heal that injury, then to play and just loose more self-insurance. As for Caro, she is wrong. Nobody is forcing her to play injured, it’s her thing she doesn’t want to loose ranking points, which is just ridiculous, when you get back healthy you’ll obviously have better results. The rules are simple- no game, no points. I mean, it’s not WTA’s conserne you got injured and can’t play, things like that happen in every sport.

  5. Not sure if Dinara still has the same coach, but if she does I think the first step to her healing, mentally and physically, is to get rid of him. His body language on the side of court while she played was so demoralizing,negative and unpleasant. Get better…you will know when you are ready.

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