Injuries cloud tennis as US Open gets under way

After Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner split last year’s Grand Slams, the two superstars were expected to continue their see-saw rivalry this year.

That has not happened. Instead, injuries have foreclosed the possibility of a clash between the two champions in three of the four Grand Slams, with the Spaniard missing the French Open and Wimbledon due to a wrist injury and the Italian absent from New York because of a knee injury.

Alcaraz and Sinner are far from alone among top players missing big tournaments this year due to injury, a trend that has been a source of growing alarm in the sport.

Italy’s Lorenzo Musetti and France’s Arthur Fils missed earlier Grand Slams this year due to injury but are playing in New York, while women’s No. 2 seed Elena Rybakina is nursing a heel injury as she prepares for her first round. Canada’s Victoria Mboko missed Wimbldedon and the US Open due to injury, along with Britain’s Jack Draper. Compared with earlier generations, today’s best tennis players have access to more sophisticated practices in fitness and nutrition, greater candor about mental health, and improved technology in detecting and treating injuries.

“We’re losing the battle overall despite the advances in sports medicine,” said Neeru Jayanthi, who leads the tennis medicine program at Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, Georgia.

The injury problem points to the downside of the greater physicality needed to compete at the highest levels of a sport where play is becoming faster and more powerful all the time, enabled by racquet innovations that allow for wicked topspin shots that did not exist in earlier tennis eras.

“The game has gotten more intense, because the players have gotten bigger, faster and stronger,” said Mackie Shilstone, a longtime fitness expert who worked with Serena Williams for 14 years.

The faster pace places greater strain on the body when it changes direction, while more severe weather due to climate change also takes a toll, Shilstone said.

Adding to that, the big business of tennis is played over 11 months of the year, highlighted by the four Grand Slams and a series of mandatory 1,000-level tournaments.

“You can’t go 11 months straight and travel all over the world,” Shilstone said. “There has to be planned recovery built in.”

Extreme topspin is a factor in the rising incidence of wrist injuries seen at all levels of tennis, said New York hand and wrist surgeon Remy Rabinovich at Northwell Health, who perceives a silver lining in that players are opting to rest rather than playing through pain.

“There is a big element of preventative medicine and more strategic ways of playing in the hopes of having a longer career,” Rabinovich said.

Alcaraz on Friday said he decided to rest until he was ready to come back to “hopefully have a really long career.”

Novak Djokovic has had injuries in the past few years, but at 39, was a contender at this year’s US Open, but he crashed out in the first round.

Injuries in tennis are not new. Among the group of recently retired greats, Rafael Nadal was out of commission for significant stretches in his peak years due to injury, while hip problems largely derailed Andy Murray’s career after he won Wimbledon and the Olympics in 2016.

Roger Federer, who avoided major injury for most of his career, retired in 2022 after realizing “the knee can’t do it anymore,” he said last week.

Since Federer retired, the tours have shifted many of the 1,000-level tournaments to two-week coed events with 96-player draws, which the “players are probably mentally and physically adjusting to,” Federer said, adding that not overplaying is “easier said than done.”

A 2024 study by the European Journal of Sport Science in pro matches from the 1970s through 2019 pointed to an overall increase in match retirements.

However, a 2016 study showed no increase in injuries at Wimbledon between 2003 and 2012, while ruing “a paucity of published data describing the incidence of injury in elite tennis.”

Mitigating injuries is expected to figure into a Grand Slam Player Advisory Council announced earlier this week, according to a news release that identified player welfare as an aspect of the council’s mandate.

Addressing the tennis schedule is the most often-discussed response to the injury problem, but Jayanthi defends a broader approach, maintaining that major injuries are often the result of cumulative wear and tear from more years of intense play in juniors.

“Perhaps we should revisit the way we decide to train our younger players to position them for long-term success,” he said.

Taiwanese badminton veteran Chou Tien-chen rose two places to No. 4 in the latest Badminton World Federation (BWF) men’s singles world rankings released yesterday following his bronze-medal finish at a tournament in India last week. The 36-year-old Chou advanced to the semi-finals of the BWF World Championships in New Delhi, where he lost to Japan’s Kodai Naraoka, earning a bronze medal and 10,500 ranking points. After the points were added to total ranking points, Chou climbed to No. 4 with 86,580 points.

The reshuffle also saw former world No. 1 Shi Yuqi of China drop to No. 6 after being eliminated in the

TIGHT TIES: Throwing the opening pitch for the Nats game is the latest in a series of efforts by the Taiwanese-American astronaut to celebrate Taiwan and the US Taiwan-born astronaut Kjell Lindgren threw the ceremonial first pitch at the Washington Nationals’ Taiwan Heritage Day at Nationals Park on Saturday before the game against the Miami Marlins. Speaking before the Nationals’ second Taiwanese Heritage Day, Lindgren said throwing the first pitch was “right up there in terms of anxiety-provoking” with some of his past accomplishments, including two rocket launches, two atmospheric reentries and two spacewalks.

“But I’m really excited to be a part of this celebration of Taiwan heritage,” he said, adding that it was “an opportunity to really celebrate the relationship, the partnership, the history between the United States and

Serena Williams getting back on the court at the US Open after a four-year absence and Carlos Alcaraz returning to competitive tennis after being out the past four months with injury brought cheers and nostalgia to the Grand Slam tournament. The celebration was short-lived. After winning their debut playing together, Williams and Alcaraz on Tuesday got knocked out in the mixed doubles quarter-finals by Belinda Bencic and Flavio Cobolli 5-4 (4), 4-1.

Cobolli before the match called their opponents “the queen of tennis and the king of now.” The star-studded duo with a combined eight US Open singles championships certainly

Park So-yeon is set to become the first woman to represent South Korea’s national team in e-sports and wants to pave the way for more in the male-dominated world of competitive gaming.
South Korea is an e-sports powerhouse and Park has been chosen to compete in survival horror game Identity V at the Asian Games in Nagoya and the wider Aichi area from Sept. 19 to Oct. 4.
The 23-year-old Park, the only woman in South Korea’s team of 36 e-sports competitors heading to Japan, said she wanted to “go all out and have no regrets.”
“As I am the first, I feel