Eugenie Bouchard to retire from tennis at Canadian Open in Montreal

New York Times

a day ago

Eugenie Bouchard, the 2014 Wimbledon finalist and former world No. 5, will retire from tennis at the WTA 1,000 Canadian Open in Montreal, which begins later this month.
Bouchard, 31, who was born in Montreal, announced her final professional event in a post on X Wednesday. ' You'll know when it's time. For me, it's now. Ending where it all started: Montreal,' she wrote.
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Tennis Canada confirmed that Bouchard would receive a main-draw wild card for the event, which is one rung below the Grand Slams. Bouchard will play her first-round match either Sun. June 27 or Mon. June 28.
Bouchard, who is currently unranked, has played two WTA Tour main draw matches in the past two years: at the 2023 Guadalajara Open, where she received a wild card. She entered the Hall of Fame Open in Newport, R.I., the past week, but lost in the opening round to world No. 286 Anna Rogers of the U.S.
Bouchard also received a qualifying wild card to last year's Canadian Open, but lost in the first of two matches she would have had to win to get into the main draw. That year the women's event was held in Toronto; the men's and women's events alternate between the two cities year by year.
2014 was Bouchard's breakout year. While she lost that Wimbledon final to Petra Kvitová 6-3, 6-0, she also reached the semifinals of the Australian and French Opens, propelling herself into the WTA top 10. She won her first and only WTA Tour singles title that year, beating Karolína Plíšková to win the now-defunct Nuremberg Cup, a clay-court warm up for the French Open, as well as defeating Angelique Kerber and Simona Halep en route to the Wimbledon final. She also reached the final of the inaugural Wuhan Open in China, where she again lost to Kvitová.
Her form dipped the following year, but she made the fourth round of the U.S. Open. Ahead of her match against Roberta Vinci, she slipped on cleaning fluid in a trainer's room and suffered a concussion. Bouchard sued the U.S. Tennis Association (USTA) for damages; the two parties reached a confidential settlement in 2018.
By 2017, Bouchard was, if jokingly, very much aware of the pressure of having been Canada's leading women's player alone for so long. At that year's Canadian Open, in which 2019 U.S. Open champion and compatriot, Bianca Andreescu, made her debut as a wild card at 17, Bouchard said that she could be 'someone else' to 'carry the burden of Canada.'
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'I'm relatively young, but I feel old in a way,' Bouchard said at a news conference during the event.
'I've been on tour a bunch of years already. I think it's important to feel the pressure of time a little bit to get into action and not just sit back and relax and let years go by.'
Despite reaching two WTA tournament finals in 2020 and 2021, a combination of injuries and loss of form, including 17 months out due to shoulder surgery in 2021 and 2022, saw Bouchard fall down the rankings. In 2023, she won two doubles matches as Canada won the Billie Jean King Cup for the first time.
As her tennis appearances have become more sporadic, Bouchard has turned to pickleball, competing alongside 2003 U.S. Open champion Andy Roddick against eight-time major champion Andre Agassi and 22-time major champion Steffi Graf in the 'Pickleball Slam' earlier this year.