The world of sports woke up this Wednesday shocked by the premature retirement of Ashleigh Barty, the number one of the WTA. Beyond herself and her relatives, no one could imagine such a decision. a 25 year old champion seated at the top, which accumulates more than a hundred weeks at the head of the ranking, and whose last image on a track refers us to his coronation in the first Grand Slam of the course: the Australian Open. If we recently wrote in this same space about the stars that extend their careers to unthinkable limits, such as the cases of the forties Tom Brady and Alejandro Valverdethe tennis player represents the completely opposite case, that of an athlete who at a young age feels that she no longer has “nothing more to give” and that he wants to dedicate himself to “other dreams”. It is not a behavior as common as that of the ‘old rockers’, but there are cases, there are. Without parking the racket, the most illustrious precedent starred Bjorn Borg at 26 years old. But there are other more recent examples in sport, such as pilots Nico Rosberg and Casey Stoner.
The reasons that push an athlete to stop his career in full splendor are, surely, of an intimate nature. They may be related to the pressure that must be endured to remain in the elite. We have already seen other champions like Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka collapse. Or, simply, they can be linked to the more personal sphere, to the choice of other priorities outside of sport. This is deduced from the words of Barty, who clarifies that his dreams for the future “do not include having to travel” or “being away” from his family and from his house. In the case of an athlete from Oceania, these factors are more exhausting, because they happen a long time outside your country or put on airplanes. It already happened to Stoner. And now his compatriot seems to follow the same path.