Andrea Petkovic cries. Her letting go of her beloved tennis begins with sadness. Later, weeks after her last match, she feels disoriented, lost. Without contour, she writes. Her words are impressive: “When I eat healthy, I don’t know why. If I sleep for eight hours, I don’t know what’s the point. When I breathe in and breathe out, I don’t know what’s for.”
So much of her life was focused on tennis. The regular daily routine, the diet. She did everything to show the best performance. Suddenly that disappeared. Petkovic describes the end of her career, the path to it and the lows that she quickly overcame in her second book: “Time to get away.” She tells how difficult it was for her to say goodbye and how she enters a new life.
“I underestimated the whole experience of ending my career a bit,” she tells the German Press Agency, “because I always had the feeling that I had built up so many other things for myself and that it wouldn’t be so bad for me to let go of tennis. And then boom, surprise: it was very bad.”
Andrea Petkovic won almost nine million dollars in prize money during her career
Source: dpa
She started the first chapter as the end approached to sort out her thoughts. The 36-year-old, born in 1987 in what was then Yugoslavia, was, alongside Angelique Kerber, one of the most successful German tennis players of the post-Steffi Graf era. She has since risen to number nine in the world, reached the semi-finals of the 2014 French Open and won almost nine million dollars in prize money. But she was hurt again and again. She is getting older and can no longer keep up with the world’s best.
“Hold on”
“I had two voices in my head the whole time in the last year of my career. On the one hand, this: “I’m too old, I can’t do it anymore, I have to stop now,” she describes on the one hand, tired of the pressure: “And on the other hand, the other Andrea, who always said: “Hold on . You enjoy it, you love the sport.”
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The force with which the break in her life hit her after all those years of professional tennis in the summer of 2022 surprised her. Tennis is like “family,” says Petkovic: “Being a competitive athlete is an identity. I think you feel like you’re taking a whole part of yourself and throwing it away.”
She felt prepared. Petkovic is considered to be multi-interested, educated and ambitious. She had already tried out various fields during her career. She published a book, wrote for various media and appeared as a presenter on ZDF.
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“It is easy to understand that it is a painful separation,” says sports psychologist Babett Lobinger from the German Sport University in Cologne. On the one hand, life as a tennis professional is privileged. On the other hand, you are a wanderer and have the pressure to perform. And competitive sports determine a lot of your personality.
Mourning a phase of life
Many people are familiar with such a break on a small scale, for example when retiring or changing jobs or cities, says the sports psychologist. “When the facet is added: ‘Who am I when I no longer have this role, that is a serious process,’ explains the sports psychologist about the end of her career as an intensive conclusion. For Lobinger, Petkovic is a role model who does a lot of things right when he leaves. “Grief is also part of closing the chapter. As well as facing it and allowing yourself to go through different phases of anger and sadness.”
Petkovic also went through a phase in which she ate cake until she felt sick. She was sometimes useless on her cell phone until two in the morning. “Just because I could. It was like a little child doing something forbidden,” she says. “But I realized relatively quickly that you can also live healthily in order to feel good.”
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Worse than the actual end of her career itself was the time before, when she decided after Wimbledon 2022 that it was over: “I just cried.”
The first serious thoughts arose in 2020 after knee surgery. 2021 was supposed to be her last year. But the pandemic gave her time to regenerate, and so she hung on for a season. She finally lost her last match at the US Open 2022 against the Swiss Belinda Bencic – and afterwards felt not only sad, but also liberated and relieved. The great pressure fell away. In the end, pain in the elbow would have been the last straw. “It wasn’t a bang I wanted.”
Andrea Petkovic in her last professional game against Belinda Bencic
Those: picture alliance / DPPI media
For Petkovic, tennis with the permanent knockout system felt like an addiction that she couldn’t shake. “Normal life is much, much more complex. When you grow up as a tennis player, you get used to black and white thinking. Won or lost.” Euphoria or disillusionment.
The 36-year-old continues to play some tennis and works as a mentor for talent in the German Tennis Association. She will also comment on this for Sky in the future – and wants to continue writing. Looking back, the end of her career was the “perfect farewell”. “Because I think that things would have gone downhill rapidly after that,” she says: “These ideal resignations that we have in our heads, that we would triumph again somewhere big, are rather the exception. And then on top of that, when you win a tournament, you think, “Why should I stop now?”
