Six-times Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek retired from her Madrid Open round-of-32 match against American \u200bAnn Li on Saturday due to illness, trailing 6-7(4) \u200c6-2 0-3.<\/p>\n
The fourth seed at the WTA 1000 clay-court tournament left the court in tears, having called for medical \u200bassistance during the match.<\/p>\n
“The past two days \u200bwere pretty terrible, I think I have \u2060some virus,” said Swiatek, who won the Madrid \u200btitle in 2024.<\/p>\n
“It’s been some hours fine, some hours \u200bpretty bad. I had zero energy, zero stability, and I just felt really bad physically.<\/p>\n
“I knew that (it was) going to \u200bbe hard but I still wanted to try \u200bbecause I already have been sick twice in my career \u200cand \u2060I could still win most of my matches. I guess it depends on how bad it is, and I guess this time it was worse \u200bthan before.”<\/p>\n
Swiatek’s withdrawal \u200bdeals a \u2060blow to her preparations for the French Open, a tournament the Pole has \u200bdominated in recent years, winning the \u200btitle \u2060four times, most recently in 2024.<\/p>\n
Swiatek, 24, is expected to continue her build-up to Roland Garros at the \u2060Italian \u200bOpen, which runs from May \u200b5-17.<\/p>\n
The French Open main draw gets underway on May 24.<\/p>\n
–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":33018,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[20],"class_list":["post-33017","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-sport","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"The French Open main draw gets underway on May 24.","published_date":"","news_description":"","form_embed":"The French Open main draw gets underway on May 24.","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/33017","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":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/33017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33019,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/33017\/revisions\/33019"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=33017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}