Ana Ivanovic is on vacation in an undisclosed sunny locale, which is what she’s been saying she needs for a while now, and exactly where her fans should want her to be.
The former No. 1 shut things down a couple of weeks ago, withdrawing from the China Open with a respiratory infection and foregoing any more play in 2009. Most players are content with revealing a minimum amount of information on such occasions, but not Ivanovic, who wrote an earnest, blunt confessional to her fans that also was e-mailed to journalists.
“I guess having to withdraw from Beijing is an appropriate ending to a very disappointing season,” Ivanovic began. She was No. 11 at the time and has since slipped to No. 14, but readily admitted the numbers aren’t reflective of her play or state of mind: “I have no idea how I am ranked so highly, but to look on the bright side, I can’t play any worse than I did this year, and I’m still in the top 20!”
The 21-year-old Serbian has suffered through a lot of minor yet troublesome injuries in the 13 months since she fell from her perch at the top of the WTA rankings, but by far the worst bleeding was internal. After a heady run to the 2008 French Open title, her confidence drained almost visibly week by week.
Both in her recent letter and in a gallant, teary-eyed press conference following an ugly, first-round loss to Kateryna Bondarenko at the U.S. Open, Ivanovic described a self-destructive cycle where she would push too hard in rehab, press too much when she got back into matches, then get injured again and interrupt any small momentum she’d built up. “Instead of being patient and accepting that my best form was almost impossible due to physical limitations, I was always over thinking things, and I never dealt with it very well,” she wrote.
The worst disappointments came at the worst times. Ivanovic has not managed to advance past the round of 16 in six Slams since she won Roland Garros. She looked as if she might be turning things around at Wimbledon this summer when she breezed past Samantha Stosur in straight sets to book a fourth-round meeting with Venus Williams, but hurt her thigh during the match and was forced to retire in the second set.
“If she only could have at least completed the match against Venus, it wouldn’t have been as devastating, but there she was, doing physiotherapy on what was supposed to be a holiday,” said her agent, Gavin Versi.
ESPN analyst Pam Shriver agreed with Ivanovic’s tough self-assessment, saying the building blocks of her game have toppled like dominoes. “Whatever aura she had ran out, and people realized she was vulnerable,” Shriver said. “While [Dinara] Safina had her meltdowns in the late stages of Slams, Ivanovic was having hers in the early rounds.”
Source: mirosport.net
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