Twelve months ago, Grigor Dimitrov suffered one of the most devastating nights of his career at Wimbledon.<\/p>\n
The 35-year-old Bulgarian left Centre Court in tears after he was forced to retire because of a pectoral injury when leading world number one Jannik Sinner by two sets last year.<\/p>\n
From being on the verge of a spectacular victory, Dimitrov instead retired from a match at a fifth consecutive Grand Slam as physical issues continued to plague him.<\/p>\n
The nature of the injury also left him doubting if he would ever fully recover.<\/p>\n
This year, the emotions were very different.<\/p>\n
Now back to full health, Dimitrov claimed a 7-6 (7-4) 6-3 7-5 win over Australia’s Dane Sweeny on a day the former Wimbledon semi-finalist said he would never forget.<\/p>\n
Dimitrov, who remained on court signing autographs and posing for photos long after his win, told BBC Sport: “I just wanted to take it all in. I’m incredibly appreciative of the support I’ve had.<\/p>\n
“I’m very grateful to Wimbledon for trusting me with a wildcard. That shows appreciation, and I felt a lot of love out there. <\/p>\n
“At the same time, I don’t want to let people down. There are so many reasons why I play this sport, and that connection with the fans is a big one.<\/p>\n
“Over a career, there are certain moments you always remember, and this will definitely be one of them.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twelve months ago, Grigor Dimitrov suffered one of the most devastating nights of his career at Wimbledon. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":736083,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-736082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736082","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=736082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/736083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=736082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=736082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=736082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}