The woman from Eastern Switzerland was voted comeback player of the year by the WTA. A lot will also depend on Bencic in the new year.
In October, Belinda Bencic won her tenth title on the WTA tour in Tokyo.
Rodrigo Reyes Marin / Imago
2025 started promisingly from the perspective of Swiss tennis fans. Henry Bernet, the 18-year-old tennis talent from Basel, won the Grand Slam title in the junior tournament in Australia. But after that, disappointments followed. For men in particular, there is a yawning emptiness three years after Roger Federer’s resignation in September 2022. In the ranking, 40-year-old Stan Wawrinka is the best-placed Swiss in position 157. Dominic Stricker, who was long considered a beacon of hope, is still in free fall. He only won one match on the ATP tour all year and is now in position 364 in the rankings. This means that he now has to qualify even at Challenger level if he wants to take part in the main tournament.
Belinda Bencic ensured that 2025 was not without highlights from a Swiss perspective. The 28-year-old from Eastern Switzerland returned to the WTA tour as number 487 in the rankings at the beginning of the year after the birth of her daughter Bella. She won her first title as a mother in Abu Dhabi in February, followed later by another victory at a WTA 500 tournament in Tokyo. By the end of the year, she had improved in the ranking to position 11 and is now on the threshold of the top ten, in which she had already been in fourth place in February 2020.
The first major semi-final at Wimbledon
The WTA chose Bencic as comeback player of the year for her successful return. Her exploit at Wimbledon, where she made it to the semi-finals for the second time after the US Open in 2019, undoubtedly contributed to this. Before these semi-finals, her best result at a major tournament was the quarter-finals at the 2014 US Open. The triumph in Tokyo was her tenth on the WTA tour.
But the big exclamation point, a Grand Slam victory, is still missing from her palmarès. The hunt for one begins again in January at the Australian Open. During her comeback in January, Bencic said that a victory at one of the four most important tournaments remained her big goal. At 28, she still has a little time to achieve this.
In an interview with “NZZ am Sonntag” she said at the time: “A lot has changed with the birth of Bella, but everything has actually changed for the better. Sometimes I can’t even imagine what we did with our time before Martin (Hromkovic, her partner, editor) and I became parents. Certainly many things are more strenuous. Overall, I consider it a huge enrichment to have Bella at our side.”
Start of the season alongside Wawrinka
In the meantime, traveling with the little one and her entourage is well established. Bencic’s parents and those of her partner support her in looking after the little ones. Even as a young girl, Belinda Bencic traveled through the tennis circuit with her father Ivan. Her talent was obvious. But her temperament often got in her own way. In the interview at the time, she also said that her new role as a mother had made her mature internally.
On the tennis court she now radiates an inner peace and composure that she often lacked before. For a long time she was her own toughest opponent. If a match didn’t go according to her expectations, she started to argue, rage, and sooner or later she usually lost concentration – and then the match too.
This Belinda no longer seems to exist today. Together with their undoubted talent, these are good prospects for getting Swiss tennis back on track. Bencic starts the new season in the United Cup, a mixed competition, alongside Stan Wawrinka. In the group stage the Swiss will face France and Australia in Perth. If the tennis year 2026 is to be better than the last one, a lot will once again depend on Belinda Bencic.
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