When Bencic made her top 10 debut in 2016 – aged just 18 – she became the first teenager in the top 10 of the WTA singles rankings since Caroline Wozniacki in 2009.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t until five years later, however, that she won her first big title, beating Marketa Vondrousova in the final of the Tokyo Olympics to claim the gold medal.<\/p>\n
A few WTA Tour-level titles followed in 2022 and 2023, but her pregnancy meant she missed out on defending her Olympic gold in Paris.<\/p>\n
By the time Bencic returned from her maternity break in October 2024, she had slipped to 1,213th in the world.<\/p>\n
But less than four months later, Bencic was back to her best – reaching the fourth round of the Australian Open before winning the Abu Dhabi Open, which she celebrated with Bella in one arm and the trophy in the other.<\/p>\n
A deep run at Wimbledon in July – ended in the semi-finals by eventual champion Iga Swiatek – lifted her back into the world’s top 20, and she clinched her second title of the year at October’s Pan Pacific Open.<\/p>\n
During Wimbledon, she said: “I see myself as a mum first, and then a tennis player. My priorities are clearly with my family.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Bencic made her top 10 debut in 2016 – aged just 18 – she became the first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":403502,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-403501","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/403502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}