This may be a strange time to retire, as there is no tennis anyway, but former Top 50 player Anna Tatishvili didn’t want to wait for this COVID-19 pandemic to subside and took to Twitter to announce her immediate retirement from professional tennis.
The 30-year-old Georgian-born American, who reached a career-high ranking of world No.50 in 2012, explained the reasons for ending her career:
A lot of you have been asking me when my next tournament is and when will you see me back on the court. Unfortunately, due to recurring injuries, my body is not allowing me to play competitive tennis any longer — it turned out that professional tennis is not only a fight on the court but also an equal degree, maybe even more, a fight with injuries.
Anna Tatishvili started playing tennis at age 4 when sister bought her a racquet and took her to the courts.
No matter how painful the decision was for me, I had to decide to leave professional tennis and focus on my career off the court.
Last year was especially hard for Tatishvili, as her 6-0 6-1 loss to Maria Sakkari in the first round of Roland Garros was deemed as not meeting the standards expected of a professional athlete, so she was stripped off of her entire first-round earnings. Tatishvili then hired lawyers to help her overturn the decision and restore her name and the Grand Slam Board reversed the unprecedented sanction, acknowledging that Tatishvili played “professionally from the first to the very last point” and returning her €46,000 first-round prize money.
After the hardships at Roland Garros, Tatishvili played just two more tournaments, both in June 2019, quickly losing in the opening round both times.
