(Stuttgart) After a long absence from the courts, Canadian Bianca Andreescu scored a victory on Tuesday at the Stuttgart tennis tournament.
Posted at 5:23 p.m.
The 21-year-old Ontarian overcame nerve-wracking moments in the opening set before defeating Germany’s Jule Niemeyer 7-6(5), 6-3 in a first-round duel.
Andreescu was down 3-5 in the first set and faced a set point in the ninth game before coming from behind and winning that set. She collected a break of service in the third game of the following set, en route to this victory.
During the match, Andreescu faced six break points and saved five. She converted three of her four break chances.
Now 121and in the world due to an absence that spanned several months, Andreescu received a free pass from the organizers to participate in the tournament.
In the second round, she will cross swords with the Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka, third seed.
Tuesday’s game was the first in 2022 for Andreescu. His last outing dated back to October 21, against Anett Kontaveit at the Indian Wells tournament.
In December, Andreescu announced that she was stepping away from tennis in a bid to recover physically and mentally from two “difficult” years.
On Twitter, Andreescu wrote that she had been affected by “several weeks in quarantine” after contracting COVID-19, and by the fact that her grandmother had to stay in the intensive care unit for several weeks. a hospital because of the coronavirus.
“A lot of days I didn’t feel like myself, especially when I was training and/or playing games. I felt like I was carrying the world on my shoulders,” she mentioned.
“I couldn’t detach myself from everything that was happening off the pitch; I felt the collective sadness and restlessness around me and it affected me. »
Andreescu was 19 when she capped a spectacular breakthrough on the international tennis scene by upsetting her idol, American Serena Williams, in the 2019 US Open women’s singles final. A few weeks earlier, Andreescu had won the Rogers Cup final in Toronto when Williams retired early in the first set.
Those victories helped propel Andreescu to a personal career-high fourth in the WTA rankings.