WIMBLEDON, England — Marketa Vondrousova held 4 items of chocolate sweet in her Wimbledon-winning left hand as she sat down with a half-dozen reporters for certainly one of her final interviews of the night.
A particular deal with, maybe, to reward herself for turning into a Grand Slam champion at age 24?
Hardly.
“I like sweets, so I’m always eating them,” Vondrousova mentioned with a smile just a few hours after beating Ons Jabeur 6-4, 6-4 at Centre Court on Saturday to develop into the primary unseeded girl to win the title on the All England Club.
Some tennis gamers, it was identified, solely enable themselves that type of indulgence after a event finishes.
“No,” got here her reply, “I don’t really care about this stuff. I also had McDonald’s after, I think, (beating No. 4 Jessica Pegula in the quarterfinals), so I’m just a normal person.”
Hardly.
There is one thing reasonably distinctive about Vondrousova, a left-hander from the Czech Republic who was the calmer participant, with the steadier strokes, for the 1 hour, 20 minutes it took to get previous a higher-ranked and extra skilled opponent underneath a retractable roof that was closed due to excessive wind.
“She played,” Jabeur mentioned, “maybe a perfect final for herself.”
That may be so – one key statistic Saturday was that Vondrousova made 13 unforced errors, Jabeur 31 – however there may be extra to it. Now set to maneuver up from No. 42 to a career-high No. 10 in Monday’s WTA rankings, Vondrousova has introduced herself as somebody to not be taken frivolously, a participant with a mixture of expertise and moxie who may very properly not be executed showing on her sport’s largest phases.
And what should make different gamers cautious is that if Vondrousova may succeed on grass courts, her least-favorite and least-successful floor, she actually must be somebody to regulate it doesn’t matter what sort of event she enters.
As a young person in 2019, additionally unseeded, Vondrousova made all of it the way in which to the ultimate of the French Open on crimson clay earlier than shedding to Ash Barty. Two years in the past, she reached the ultimate on the Tokyo Olympics on onerous courts earlier than shedding to Belinda Bencic and settling for a silver medal. Add in what she simply managed to do at Wimbledon on grass courts – eliminating 5 seeded gamers, together with No. 6 Jabeur, who’s now a three-time main runner-up – and something is feasible.
Consider this: Until going 7-0 over the previous two weeks, Vondrousova’s profession document on the All England Club was 1-4.
That’s three first-round losses and one second-round loss.
“On grass, I didn’t play so good,” she mentioned Saturday, considering of these previous outcomes and in addition considering again to her days studying tennis on clay at a membership in Prague from age 8, “so I would never have thought of (winning Wimbledon). And also, if anybody would tell me this before the tournament, I would be like, ‘No, you’re crazy.’ I think clay was the best one for me. Now it’s grass.”
Then she laughed.
“I have no problems with hard courts (or) clay, and now I have no problem with grass, also, so we’ll see what’s going to happen,” mentioned Vondrousova, who already had downed the primary of what she mentioned would most likely be a number of celebratory beers. “But I feel like for me, now, it’s great to know that I can play anywhere.”
She describes herself as “obsessed with tennis,” continuously protecting tabs on a number of matches concurrently – “I have my iPad, iPhone, everything.”
So it was tough final 12 months when she was away from the tour from April to October due to her surgically repaired left wrist. She mentioned she had a stress fracture that left bone fragments in two completely different spots, requiring two operations and a forged that ran practically as much as her shoulder. Her rating virtually fell out of the Top 100 by the tip of the season. Nike, she mentioned, didn’t renew an expiring sponsorship deal.
The second process “was really, I feel like, stressful. I couldn’t watch tennis. I was really sad,” Vondrousova mentioned. “I was playing good tennis before, and then (the wrist problems) happened, so I was like, ‘Oh, my God. I’m not going to stay healthy,’ you know? … And when you’re coming back, you never know what to expect.”
True. No strategy to know what to anticipate now, both. But given her versatility, her age and her capability to adapt to completely different surfaces, a wholesome Vondrousova appears able to a lot.
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Howard Fendrich has been the AP’s tennis author since 2002.
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