The Japanese Naomi Osaka, winner of the last US Open tennis, announced Thursday, September 17, her package for Roland-Garros (which must take place from September 27 to October 11) due to a persistent injury to a thigh.
“My thigh still hurts and I won’t have time to prepare for the clay court”, she wrote on her Twitter account. “These two tournaments were too close to each other for me to be able to link them this year”, added the one who won her third Grand Slam tournament on September 12 in New York.
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Two weeks separate these two major tournaments this year: Roland-Garros has been rescheduled due to the Covid-19 pandemic which has sealed the season for four months or even six for some players. This is the case of Naomi Osaka, who made her return to competition only at the end of August.
The 22-year-old Japanese, ranked 3e world, first played in the Cincinnati Tournament, relocated in the bubble of Flushing Meadows (a park in New York City), managing to reach the final. But she gave up the fight, injured in the left adductor, to preserve her physique and her chances for the US Open.
It took him well, since two weeks later, she registered her name for the second time on the New York major’s list, beating the Belarusian Victoria Azarenka in the final.
Osaka has also taken on another dimension outside of the courts by its activism in the fight against racism. After the death of Jacob Blake, who was shot several times in the back by a police officer in Wisconsin, she followed the boycott movement launched by the NBA team of the Milwaukee Bucks, and refused to play her half -final of Cincinnati.
The WTA circuit and the organizers of the tournament having in turn shown solidarity by canceling the matches scheduled for that day, she had finally reconsidered her decision.
At the US Open, she had maintained her desire to raise awareness in the hushed microcosm of tennis by wearing, when she arrived on the court during her seven matches, a mask with the name of a black person victim of police violence. in the USA.