Jessica Pegula might be getting a late start to her Asian Swing this year, but the top-ranked American still has several goals to achieve on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz in the final weeks of the 2026 season. Sidelined since reaching the semifinals of the US Open due to wear and tear after a “long summer,” Pegula says she’s feeling healthy again and motivated to finish the year strong.<\/p>\n
Pegula reached at least the semifinals at three of the four tournaments she played during the hard-court swing after Wimbledon, culminating in a semifinal loss to Aryna Sabalenka in New York. Afterwards, the 32-year-old acknowledged the physical toll of her busy schedule, and withdrew from scheduled events in both Singapore and Beijing.<\/p>\n
“Sometimes it can just be things happen because of accumulation of a lot of matches, playing a lot of tennis,” she said Sunday ahead of the start of the Dongfeng \u00b7 Voyah Wuhan Open, where she is the defending finalist.<\/p>\n
“When a big tournament finally ends, I think sometimes, for me at least, I start feeling a little bit run down,” she continued. “For me to balance how I’m feeling physically and mentally, it’s always to know when I’m at that threshold and maybe it’s time to let my body recover and catch up to all the activity and adrenaline that I was going through for the last few months.”<\/p>\n
Now feeling “back to normal” after several weeks of routine at home with husband Taylor Gahagen and their three dogs, Pegula is ready to make the most of her remaining tournaments, though she has yet to officially secure a place at the WTA Finals.<\/p>\n
Currently No. 3 in the Race to the WTA Finals, Pegula said she always intended to return to Wuhan, where she’ll look to build momentum ahead of a potential fifth consecutive appearance at the year-end championships.<\/p>\n
“I think competing at a WTA 1000 is always a good time to win the tournament and to try to do your best,” she said. “I didn’t necessarily want to skip Beijing, so for me, coming back to Wuhan was something I always planned to do.”<\/p>\n
Seeded No. 2 in Wuhan, Pegula opens against the winner of Jelena Ostapenko and Daria Kasatkina.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jessica Pegula might be getting a late start to her Asian Swing this year, but the top-ranked American…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":879171,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428,1959],"class_list":["post-879170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879170","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=879170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879170\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/879171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=879170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=879170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}