Sometimes when a player returns home after blowing a huge chance to win her first major, her family isn’t exactly jumping up and down to great the competitor at the door when she returns home.
Fortunately that was not the case for Agnieszka Radwanska when she arrived back in Poland after failing to take advantage of a weakened draw at Wimbledon. Radwanska, who had reached the 2012 final, was the highest seeded play left in the semis and faced the relatively inexperienced Sabine Lisicki, but could not pull through in a 9-7 third-set defeat
She took a week off after Wimbledon to rest and said that when she got back home, that her parents weren’t upset with her defeat. Her father Robert coached her full time up until two years ago.
“They were still very happy about the semifinal and they saw I was exhausted,” she said. “I don’t how I would have done without having to play the other three hour matches, but my parents saw I was fighting until the end and that the most important thing.”
The Pole still somewhat regrets the defeat though. Had she won, she would have gone up against Marion Bartoli in the final, against whom she owned a 7-0 record. But she wasn’t as quick as she needed to be against Lisicki and that proved to be her undoing.
“It was a huge chance this year,” she said. “Definitely I had a chance to win a Grand Slam. It’s always disappointing and of course I was sad that I didn’t use the opportunity that I had but I wasn’t 100 percent fit. I wanted to get to the balls and my legs were just staying in one spot. I couldn’t really move.”
Radwanska, who is the top seed at the Bank of the West Classic, also said that she was upset about the reaction from Catholic priests and a youth group in Poland to her decision to pose nude for ESPN the Body Issue.
Some called her “immoral.”
ESPN The Body Issue is supposed to celebrate the beauty of the bodies of the some of the world’s best athletes and had 77-year-old golfer Gary Player on its cover in the nude.
“I was little disappointed,” Radwanska told Reuters. “I was really surprised about everything that happened afterward. The Catholics reacted like I did a photo shoot for a men’s magazine. I was surprised because they didn’t even know what exactly the photo shoot was.”
According to Radwanska, the amount of press the subject received in Poland was” huge,” so she took to Facebook to explain that “the pictures were not meant to cause offense and to brand them as immoral clearly does not take into account the context of the magazine Moreover, they do not contain any explicit imagery whatsoever. ….I agreed to participate to help encourage young people, and especially girls, to exercise, stay in shape and be healthy.”
No. 4 Radwanska, who said that she believes she can win the US Open as Marion Bartoli’s victory at Wimbledon showed that anything can happen in the sport, said that she isn’t discouraged by her poor head-to-head records against the world’s top three of Serena Williams, Victoria Azarenka and Maria Sharapova. Azarenka especially had her way with her last year
“Every match is a different story – I would prefer to play Azarenka,” she said. “It’s a good thing to play someone from the top so you can judge yourself and your game. I sometimes feel better if I lose and I feel I was playing my best but someone was better than me, rather than playing at 30 percent [of my level] and winning. It’s always good to play someone from the top 5.”