Six-time Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek said she might have to miss mandatory tournaments to protect her health following a string of injuries among players at the China Open.<\/p>\n
The world number two from Poland reached the last 16 in Beijing after her Colombian opponent Camila Osorio retired hurt before the second set, with Swiatek winning the first 6-0.<\/p>\n
That was one of five matches to not be played to a finish in China on Monday with Lois Boisson and Zheng Qinwen also suffering injuries on court, while Lorenzo Musetti and Jakub Mensik retired from their matches in the men’s tournament.<\/p>\n
Starting last year, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) made it mandatory for top players to participate in each Grand Slam, 10 WTA 1,000 events – including Beijing – and six 500-level tournaments.<\/p>\n
But Swiatek, 24, warned she may have to take breaks to protect herself.<\/p>\n
“It’s just impossible to squeeze it in the schedule,” the former world number one said. “Maybe I will have to choose some tournaments and skip them, even though they are mandatory.<\/p>\n
“We have to be smart about it – not really unfortunately care about the rules and just think what’s healthy for us.”<\/p>\n
The amount of matches in the tennis calendar has been a major talking point in recent years, with players such as Novak Djokovic cutting back the number of tournaments they compete in as they near the end of their career.<\/p>\n
Swiatek called the requirements “pretty crazy” for top players, adding that “people are more fatigued” in the second half of the season.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know yet how my career is going to look like in a couple of years,” she added. “The only thing I can do now, when I decided I’m going to play all these mandatory tournaments, is to just take care of my body, take care of the recovery.<\/p>\n
“The Asian swing is the hardest part because you feel like the season is going to finish soon, but you still need to push.<\/p>\n
“But yeah, there are a lot of injuries. It is because the season is too long and too intense.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Six-time Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek said she might have to miss mandatory tournaments to protect her health…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168515,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-169055","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}