{"id":719837,"date":"2026-06-06T22:27:25","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T22:27:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/719837\/"},"modified":"2026-06-06T22:27:25","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T22:27:25","slug":"mirra-andreeva-how-she-became-a-champion-with-conchita-martinez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/719837\/","title":{"rendered":"Mirra Andreeva: How she became a champion with Conchita Mart\u00ednez"},"content":{"rendered":"

The player who knelt on the Court Philippe-Chatrier clay on Saturday, a Grand Slam trophy minutes away, looked like someone who had always belonged there. Calm, composed, ruthless in a 6-3 6-2 win over Maja Chwalinska \u2013 Mirra Andreeva at 19 gave the impression of a champion arriving exactly on schedule.<\/p>\n

Ask her coach where the ceiling is and Conchita Mart\u00ednez does not hesitate. \u201cShe\u2019s a natural. She\u2019s a great player,\u201d the 1994 Wimbledon champion said. \u201cWhen she works hard and when she listens and does everything, she has no limits. The sky is the limit.\u201d But the sentence has a condition built into it \u2013 when she works hard, when she listens \u2013 and that condition is the whole story.<\/p>\n

For two years, the gap between Andreeva the world-class player and Andreeva the champion was not measured in forehands. It was measured in everything around them.<\/p>\n

Mart\u00ednez, who took over the coaching in April 2024, has never pretended otherwise. \u201cI knew things had to change for her to win big things,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t change something, you make it extra difficult for yourself.\u201d Asked, on the day of the title, what had been hard about the job, she did not reach for diplomacy. \u201cHer attitude is difficult,\u201d she said warmly, with a laugh, but said plainly.\u201c You tell her something and maybe she\u2019s not open to listening.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"MirraMirra Andreeva, Roland-Garros 2026 | \u00a9 PsNewz<\/p>\n

Turbulent spring<\/p>\n

The evidence had been public: a turbulent spring, the ups and downs Mart\u00ednez kept returning to, a player whose emotions could run away with the match. The point of the past two years was not to make Andreeva a good tennis player. It was to build the mental commitment and loseness of a champion.<\/p>\n


\n \"\"
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

One of the hardest barriers they cleared, she said, was Andreeva\u2019s reluctance to fully commit to the ball in training \u2013 to go for her shots when nothing was at stake. \u201cHow are you going to improve, how are you going to hit the ball when a match starts, if you don\u2019t do it in practice?\u201d Mart\u00ednez said. It was, in her words, \u201ca very complicated barrier,\u201d and they only got past it this year.<\/p>\n

\"MirraMirra Andreeva, Roland-Garros 2026 | \u00a9 PsNewz<\/p>\n

The second brick was subtraction. The hard-court stretch \u2014 Doha, Dubai, Indian Wells, Miami \u2013\u00a0was disappointing. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t as we would have loved, results-wise\u201d : From the Australian Open through Miami, Andreeva failed to go beyond a quarter-final. In Melbourne she beat Vekic, Sakkari and Ruse before Elina Svitolina stopped her in the fourth round; in Doha and again in Miami she was beaten by the rising Canadian Victoria Mboko; in Dubai she edged past Kasatkina and Cristian before falling to Amanda Anisimova in a three-set quarter-final; and at Indian Wells, where she was defending the title, she went out in her opening match to Katerina Siniakova.<\/p>\n

So she made a deliberate decision to send Andreeva to Linz without her. \u201cI\u2019m doing a lot of weeks, and I also have a life,\u201d Mart\u00ednez said, half-joking, but the reasoning underneath was serious. \u201cI saw it as an opportunity for her to go there. Now you don\u2019t have anybody to blame. You go there, you play your matches, and you think a little bit too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy psychologist said\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

She was on the phone constantly, preparing each match \u2013 but she was not in the box. Andreeva won the title. \u201cThat was the beginning of a very good clay-court season,\u201d Mart\u00ednez said, \u201cand here we are, talking about the title.\u201d After the win in Linz, came a final in Madrid, a semi-final in Stuttgart and a quarter-final in Riee. A champion has to be able to stand alone; Linz was where Andreeva learned to.<\/p>\n

But the move that turns all of this from damage-repair into something more deliberate \u2013 the move that builds a champion rather than just fixing a player \u2013 came from Andreeva herself, and it is the best thing she said all fortnight. She did not describe a reset. She described a choice. \u201cMy psychologist says you can always choose how you\u2019re going to be on court, how you\u2019re going to play, and who you\u2019re going to be as a person,\u201d she said. \u201cSo I decided to choose to be a fighter.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s nice for people to watch players try their best and fight and compete.<\/p>\n

And then she named her model. \u201cI watched a lot of Roger\u2019s matches here,\u201d she said. \u201cObviously I\u2019m never going to have the same aura \u2014 no one\u2019s going to have the same aura \u2014 but I wanted to try to impersonate the way he behaves a little on court, because I love watching how he used to play.\u201d She wanted, she said, to look good out there, not in the sense of vanity, but in the sense of bearing. \u201cNot be frustrated, not be unhappy with how I play. It\u2019s also nice for people to watch players try their best and fight and compete.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"MirraMirra Andreeva, Roland-Garros 2026 | \u00a9 FFT<\/p>\n

This is the difference between managing a weakness and constructing an identity. Andreeva did not merely learn to stop the bad behaviour; she picked a template for the good one, studied it, and tried to inhabit it. Mart\u00ednez, watching from the outside, saw the same thing and gave it its proper name. \u201cKudos to her for being willing to change, staying open, doing the hard work,\u201d she said. \u201cOnce she does the hard work, her potential just comes out.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fighter Andreeva chose to be is not a different player from the prodigy. It is the prodigy with the self-sabotage engineered out and a model of composure engineered in.<\/p>\n

The proof was in the title itself \u2013 fourteen days, Mart\u00ednez kept repeating, is not easy; \u201cshe had a lot of ups and downs during the tournament, but she has her tools now, and she was able to work with them.\u201d The wobble in the final, two games conceded from 5-love, was met not with a meltdown but with a calm tactical read about the wind. The old Andreeva might have unravelled. This one closed it out.<\/p>\n

This thing is a little bit addicting.<\/p>\n

And now comes the most telling sign of all that a champion, not just a player, walked off that court: she wants it again, immediately. \u201cThis thing is a little bit addicting,\u201d Andreeva said, already talking about preparing for the grass season. \u201cI really want to do my best to experience all of this for a second time.\u201d It is the appetite of someone who has tasted the thing the talent was always capable of and intends to make it a habit.<\/p>\n

Mart\u00ednez, who has seen the ups and the downs, supplied the brake. \u201cWe have to stay humble,\u201d she said. \u201cNothing comes easy. Feet on the floor\u201d. The only way she knows to reach the sky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The player who knelt on the Court Philippe-Chatrier clay on Saturday, a Grand Slam trophy minutes away, looked…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":719838,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-719837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/719838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}