(Paris) Former world No.2 Paula Badosa admitted Monday that the back pain which has caused her enormous pain since the stress fracture suffered last year was calling into question her career, and that she was counting on injections. of cortisone to last “another three or four years”.
“In Indian Wells (at the beginning of March), the doctors told me that it would be very difficult to continue my career,” admitted, for the first time, the Spanish player who fell back to 101e world ranking this week, in a podcast posted online by the WTA.
“I told them I needed a solution, something. We tried these cortisone shots. They told me that they had nothing else to offer me and that I might have to continue (doing these injections) if I wanted to play for a few more years,” explained the Spaniard from 26 years.
“The pain is still there, but sometimes it was so much that I couldn’t bear it. Now I can,” she added, specifying that she took her treatment “every day”.
Faced with this gloomy future, she felt that “to be well for another three or four years would be great”.
She said she doesn’t set a goal, but wants to get back into the top 30 worldwide and even “in a year or a year and a half, in the top 10 “.
The difficulty is that the doctors told her that she would have to play “fewer tournaments”.
“Playing on earth will be the best. On grass, it should be fine. But on hard, that’s where I suffer the most.”
Since her loss in the quarterfinals in May 2023 in Rome, a tournament during which she suffered a stress fracture in her spine, Badosa has missed numerous tournaments, including Roland-Garros and the 2023 United States Open, and n ‘has more than three victories in a row.
In Stuttgart last week, she retired in the second round, this time suffering from a muscle injury in her left thigh. She left the court in tears.
She is registered this week for the WTA 1000 in Madrid.