Louisa Thomas on the tennis player Amanda Anisimova’s impressive career as she returns to play the 2026 Australian Open.
She exchanged a word with the people in her box. Then, noticeably calmer, she quickly closed out the win. Afterward, she was asked about the stretch of back-and-forth games. “That’s what I love about the sport is those really intense moments,” she said.
“I really enjoy it,” she added. Perhaps there was a bit of revisionism, or masochism, in her answer. But I was inclined to believe her. What was the worst that could have happened, after all? She might lose a tennis match? Anisimova knows what it’s like to lose tennis matches. She knows what it’s like to be humiliated on the court—on the biggest stage, with the most people watching. Wimbledon, Centre Court, a princess sitting next to Billie Jean King in the royal box, champagne in the stands and flowers everywhere adorning the grounds. It’s the stuff of dreams—and, last July, as Anisimova walked into the sunshine to greet this scene and an applauding crowd, she was riding the residual rush from her performance in the Wimbledon semifinals, having beaten Aryna Sabalenka, the No. 1 player in the world, by exhibiting the kind of brave, powerful tennis that had been expected of her for so long. Her path to the final was all the more inspiring because two years earlier she’d taken an eight-month break from the sport and then suffered a series of injuries upon her return; the previous year, she hadn’t even made it into the main draw of Wimbledon, and had lost in the third round of qualifying. But, rather than a dream, her trip to the final was a nightmare: a 6–0, 6–0 drubbing, by Iga Świątek, in less than an hour. Anisimova sobbed through the trophy presentation. But that deep disappointment lasted only a moment, apparently—thirty minutes later, she was on the phone with a friend, laughing about the absurdity of the situation. And several weeks after that, when she had to face Świątek again, in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open, she did something almost unimaginable: the night before, she watched the replay of the Wimbledon final. No one told her to do it, but she needed to figure out what she had done wrong, she explained later, and she needed to be able to move past it. She wouldn’t let that loss define her. It was tough to blame them. I watched her play in Miami that year, and seeing her technique and power up close, I was as transfixed by her potential as everyone else. I made plans to write about her on the eve of the U.S. Open, and was in a taxi on the way to the tournament when I got a call saying that the interview had to be cancelled, because her father had died suddenly. Anisimova went home and, for a while, found it difficult to leave the house. When she came back to the tour, the publicity machine picked up where it had left off—that fall, she extended a deal with Nike rumored to have been worth a hundred million dollars. Her performance plateaued, however, and she was miserable. She played intermittently through the first half of 2023 and then announced that she was stepping away from the tour. Being at tournaments had become “unbearable,” she wrote on Instagram. She took college classes; she painted and spent time with friends. She also worked with a therapist who specializes in trauma. Last summer, she told “Intelligencer” that dialectical behavioral therapy had been transformative for her. She returned to tennis ranked outside the top three hundred, and had to work her way into the main draws of tournaments through qualifying, or accept wild cards. It wasn’t easy, particularly because she was frequently injured and her practices were hindered by pain. But she started working with a physiotherapist named Shadi Soleymani, who was trained as a chiropractor, and whom the Athletic described as the “chief of staff” of Anisimova’s team. Soleymani used massage, mobility, and strength work to break down scar tissue that had built up on the left side of Anisimova’s body. One gets the sense that Soleymani, like her therapist, helped Anisimova heal other scars as well. Anisimova won a big tournament in Beijing in the fall, and was among the final four at the W.T.A. Finals, open only to the year’s top eight players. She finished the year with ten wins over players ranked inside the top ten. She had a 15–4 record in three-set matches, which is perhaps even more impressive: resilience, after all, means recovering again and again. This past week, she has won her first three matches at the Australian Open in straight sets, but survived stretches of scrappy play in all three. She’ll be tested again soon. ♦
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