Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff said they drew inspiration from American figure skater Alysa Liu’s dramatic return from burnout to Olympic gold, \u200ba comeback all the more remarkable considering how abruptly her career had \u200cseemed to end.<\/p>\n
Liu stunned the world by retiring aged 16 after the Beijing Games in 2022 citing burnout, but returned and put on a dazzling display at the Milano Cortina Games \u200blast month to snap a 20-year Olympic medal drought for Americans in the \u200bwomen’s event.<\/p>\n
“I think overall what happened in figure skating was super \u2060interesting, from a psychological point of view,” tennis world number two Swiatek told \u200breporters ahead of the Indian Wells tournament on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“I saw Liu winning when actually \u200bshe had some troubles, like before she was burned out and she had to stop, and now she seems like everything she does, she does to have fun and to really show \u200bher amazing skills in a way that makes her happy.<\/p>\n
“I haven’t spoken to \u200bher but it’s really inspiring. I’ll remember it for a long time.”<\/p>\n
Liu returned to the ice \u200cin \u20602024 with more creative control, taking charge of her music choices, programmes and costumes, and went on to win the world title in Boston last year.<\/p>\n
World number four Gauff said that although she had never experienced burnout, she could understand the \u200bpressure Liu was under \u200bhaving burst onto \u2060the scene herself as a 15-year-old qualifier at the 2019 Wimbledon Championships.<\/p>\n
“I think her whole story was super inspiring and \u200bI could highly relate as someone who was very young \u200bput into \u2060a sport,” Gauff said.<\/p>\n
“I wouldn’t say I’ve faced burnout, but there are times you’re mentally just tired of it and you feel like you’re doing stuff and you don’t \u2060know \u200bwhy.<\/p>\n
“So I definitely could relate to her whole story. \u200bI was happy to see her be that voice saying the unsaid things that athletes think but \u200bare maybe scared to say.”<\/p>\n
–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":27677,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[20],"class_list":["post-27674","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-sport","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"Liu returned to the ice \u200cin \u20602024 with more creative control.","published_date":"","news_description":"Liu returned to the ice \u200cin \u20602024 with more creative control.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/27674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/27674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27678,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/27674\/revisions\/27678"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=27674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}