Update Post: November 28, 2023 9:04 am
He returned from injury and rose through the ranks. Pavlyuchenkova nominated for WTA award
Arina Poluyanova November 21, 2023, 23:30 Moscow time Audio version: Your browser does not support the audio element.
Anastasia could win the award for best comeback of the year.
Russian tennis players performed well last season. 11 of them finished the year in the top 100 of the world rankings. Several more played in the minor and major final tournaments. And at the end of the season, five Russian women were nominated for the annual WTA award.
32-year-old Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova was included in the “Comeback of the Year” nomination. And very deservedly so.
In 2021, Pavlyuchenkova showed some of her best results: she climbed to the top 10 of the WTA rankings, stopping at 11th place, reached the final of Roland Garros and won Olympic gold in mixed doubles with Andrey Rublev.
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The following season, things became more complicated for Pavlyuchenkova: on New Year’s Day she contracted the coronavirus and missed the first two tournaments at the beginning of the season. At the Australian Open, Anastasia reached the third round, but then began to withdraw from tournaments due to knee pain. At the beginning of May, the Russian played a match in the “thousands” in Madrid and Rome, and then finished the season ahead of schedule.
Pavlyuchenkova missed the entire second half of the 2022 season while recovering from a knee injury. Because of this, she was unable to defend points for the Roland Garros final, the third round of Wimbledon and the fourth round of the US Open.
Pavlyuchenkova began 2023 as the world’s No. 367 racket player. The Russian began qualifying for tournaments using a special classification. At first, Anastasia dropped out in the early rounds, so she fell even further down the leaderboard, to 846th place.
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Before the happy Roland Garros, Pavlyuchenkova shared her plans to return to the top of the women’s circuit.
“There are definitely a lot of things I think I could improve in my game, which is what I’m trying to do now. My goal is not just to return to tennis. “I want to be the best version of myself, play better than two years ago, when I was at the peak of my career,” Anastasia said at a press conference in Paris.
At the French Open, the Russian performed well: she reached the quarterfinals and immediately rose to 115th place in the ranking.
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This season, Pavlyuchenkova did not play many tournaments, but during the autumn Asian series she showed good results. She completed the Five Hundred in Tokyo at the semi-final stage and Anastasia finished the ATP-250 series competition in Hong Kong in the quarter-finals.
As a result: at the end of the current season, the 32-year-old Russian stopped at 58th place in the ranking. Throughout the year she rose 788 positions. Sounds like a great comeback.
In addition to Pavlyuchenkova, in the “Return of the Year Category”.
Now the winner of the award will be chosen by journalists from the main sports media.