But he got some much-needed rest after arriving in NY on Sunday, taking both Monday and Tuesday off. “I’ve just felt a lot of pressure”. “So, you know, I’m starting to feel better now, and that’s really positive”.
Advertisement
Now the No. 7 seed, the 33-year-old enters the 2016 tournament with her eyes set on winning her first Grand Slam singles title (she has five doubles titles) and showing her magical 2015 run was no fluke.
When he first came back, he recalled, “you try to find movements to avoid the pain”.
But Williams may not play her way into the history books as easily as she would like, after she started feeling pain in her shoulder just 24 hours after her Wimbledon victory. “(It’s) Serena and the rest of the field”, she said, laughing. She says she is doing a lot of physical therapy.
Doesn’t always seem to matter that she owns a record-tying 22 major singles titles heading into the U.S. Open, which begins Monday with a retractable roof at Arthur Ashe Stadium for the first time.
While Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have spent 656 combined weeks at No. 1, Murray has only dreamed of ruling tennis’ big four.
Serena Williams unveiled a new sports bra and tennis racquet in a dizzying round of commercial duties this week, but when talk turned to her injured shoulder on Friday, the American preferred to reveal as little as possible.
Even if Djokovic manages to fully recover physically, questions remain about his mental state given the 29-year-old’s admission that “private issues” lurked in the background of his Wimbledon exit.
Both Djokovic and Williams face a former Grand Slam semifinalist in the first round. Friday was the first time either had discussed the health problems that stymied them in Rio de Janeiro and forced them to withdraw from the hard-court warmup at Cincinnati.
Serena Williams admits she feels under-cooked ahead of the start of the US Open on Monday.
Russian Makarova who’s now in no. 8 in latest WTA Rankings, was able to defeat Williams in the 2014 US Open and 2015 Australian Open tournaments. Djokovic still has just one Olympic medal, a 2008 singles bronze he earned in Beijing. In addition to that, French Open victor Garbine Muguruza and Agnieszka Radwanska are also predicted to pull Williams out from the court during the semi-finals.
The German’s potential semi-final opponent comes from a more impressive quarter that includes third-seeded French Open champion Garbine Muguruza, Olympic champion Monica Puig, Briton Johanna Konta and big-hitting American Madison Keys, the eighth seed.
On the men’s side, top-ranked Novak Djokovic, who injured his left wrist just before the Rio Olympics, will open the final Grand Slam event of the season against 2013 Wimbledon semifinalist Jerzy Janowicz.
Djokovic admitted that he had been suffering with his wrist injury for almost a month and was having intensive treatment in the hope of being “as close to 100 per cent as possible during the course of this tournament, at least for the beginning of it”.
Advertisement
Key Statistic II: 186 – Number of consecutive weeks Williams will have spent at No. 1 by the end of the U.S. Open, equaling Graf’s all-time WTA record.
