By Chris Oddo | @TheFanChild | Thursday 15 August 2024
There can be advantages to wasting time in the tennis tournament, and Jessica Pegulawho missed a good chunk of 2024 due to injury, hopes to capitalize during a time of year when many of her peers are exhausted from the fall.
Pegula, who just won the title in Toronto last week, told reporters he feels fresher than usual this time of year, due to injuries keeping him out early in the season.
“I’ve lost a lot since the beginning of the year, so I feel really good mentally where some other people might feel more down,” she said, according to David Kane of Tennis.com. “I’m mentally prepared to finish the year off better than I have been in recent years.”
Pegula missed time in January and early February with a neck injury, then missed the European clay-court season with a rib injury, among other things.
Ironically, that bodes well for the 30-year-old six-time WTA champion. With many of the tour’s top players struggling — see Coco Gauff and Elena Rybakina, who both pulled out of Cincinnati on Thursday — Pegula is well-positioned to make a push at the US Open.
Surely she would like to break through and reach a semi-final at a major for the first time. She has lost each of her previous six Grand Slam quarterfinals, but perhaps those fresh legs could be the difference for her at Flushing Meadows in a few weeks.
In Canada, Pegula became the first woman to repeat as champion since Martina Hingis in 2000, defeating Amanda Anisimova in the final.
🏆 BACK-TO-BACK 🏆@JPegula defends her title in #NBO24becoming the first woman in the 21st century to win two consecutive titles in Canada 🤠@Nationalbank pic.twitter.com/SDXIc2A44J
— National Open Bank (@NBOtoronto) August 12, 2024
Pegula will face tricky Czech Karolina Muchova in second-round action on Friday in a match that was called off due to rain on Thursday night in Cincinnati.
Pegula didn’t have the best time at the Olympics a few weeks ago, losing in the second round in singles and doubles, but she has adapted quickly to her favorite surface and hopes to finish the season strong.
She said it was good for her to go straight from Paris to Toronto and enter the hard court season with plenty of time to dwell on the difficulties of switching surfaces.
“Being able to come back next week and focus on the competition kind of helped me out,” she said, according to Tennis.com. “I didn’t have time to think about how I was really feeling… It was kind of like, ‘Ok, let’s see where we are. Let’s try to get the movement, the feel back on the hard court with balls,’ and things like that. I almost wonder in a way if he somehow helped me.”
