The Austrian tennis player Dominic Thiem who will retire from tennis this week at the ATP 500 in Vienna, referred to what it meant to win a Grand Slam title and acknowledged that “I thought it would make me happy forever, but it doesn’t.”
In an interview for the Tennis Majors media, Thiem, winner of the US Open in 2020, confessed that he gave “too much importance (to winning a Grand Slam).”
“I thought it would make me happy forever, that it would change my life, but it doesn’t.. The truth is that nothing changed. Honestly, if I’m still here in 20 years, Nobody will care if I was a Grand Slam champion or not.“he indicated.
Regarding what it meant to him to win that title at the US Open, he recalled: “Shortly after winning it, I realized that it didn’t have to make me happy forever. After three or four months, things went back to normality and not in the way I expected. It was a challenging experience, but I am happy to have had it.
Starting with his title at the 2020 US Open, where he beat the German Alexander Zverev in the final, an increasingly blurred version of Thiem began to be seen.
All this, added to a series of injuries to his right wrist, It was a lethal combo that never allowed him to return to his best level and ended up causing a retirement that tennis fans consider premature.
Dominic Thiem: his injuries and his experience at the Us Open
When asked about the moment in which tennis began to suffer, Thiem explained: “After the US Open I reached the quarterfinals at Roland Garros, but after that I made a mistake: I should have given myself more time to rest, I was not ready to go to Australia and get back on the circuit. Mentally and physically I was exhausted, that’s the word.”
In any case, he assured: “At some point during the 2021 season I began to feel that the internal fire was returning, that the motivation was returning… and at that moment the wrist injury arrived.”
Regarding that injury, he stated: “The wrist was never the same after that, especially regarding the right. I never found the same feeling. It took me a long time to accept that I was simply chasing old sensations: I always believed that one day I would return to the person I was before. And the moment came when I had to accept that that would not be the case.”
Thiem, 31, will close his professional career this week and in front of his people, at the ATP in Vienna, where he became champion in 2019.
Among his most notable achievements are the 2020 US Open and the 2019 Indian Wells Masters 1000. In total, he won 17 titles as a professional and reached world number 3 in 2020.
Source: Ambito
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