Latest news with #sportspsychology
Forbes
16-07-2025
- Sport
- Forbes
What Happens After The Championship? The Silent Struggle In Pro Sports
LONDON, ENGLAND - JULY 13: Jannick Sinner (ITA) [1] with the winner's trophy after winning his ... More Gentlemen's Singles Final match against Carlos Alcaraz (ESP) [2] during day fourteen of The Championships Wimbledon 2025 at All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club on July 13, 2025 in London, England. (Photo by Rob Newell - CameraSport via Getty Images) When fans and sports analysts witness an incredible win in a championship game, they assume that the athlete is feeling pure joy for a while. But what happens in the days and weeks after the celebrations and media interviews? It's far less glamorous and quite often psychologically challenging. Wimbledon this past week was a great example of a Grand Slam title that one would assume would bring immense satisfaction and happiness to the winners. However, what many fans don't recognize is the months of preparation, hours of practice, and the tremendous pressure leading up to that single moment. After the win, athletes are often left with a 'what now?' mental hurdle. The emotional crash that follows high-stakes success is a common, yet frequently unaddressed, phenomenon in all professional sports. The Post-Competition Letdown: Why It Happens Winning on the world's biggest stages can paradoxically end up with athletes feeling lost. Sports psychiatrists and sport psychologists often refer to this as 'post-competition blues' or 'post-Olympic blues.' This phenomenon has been described as 'athletes who experience negative emotions and mental health issues following the Olympic games, and is characterized by a period marked by increased anxiety, depression, burnout, and challenges in adjusting back to everyday life,' according to BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation Journal. During this post-competition period, athletes may experience anxiety, depression, burnout, or other challenges. Outside of the winners, athletes who experience a loss and unmet expectations may experience more negative reactions. For some elite athletes, on the other hand, the emotional crash can be even more intense after a win than a loss. In some sports, there is a competition only a few times a year or maybe once a year, so when elite athletes spend the year preparing for a singular moment, including training, sacrificing, and identity-development around a goal, the 'what now?' feeling after achieving it can be destabilizing. 'I totally agree—when you work so hard for something and you finally achieve it, there is a what do I do now moment,' says Grand Slam tennis champion and humanitarian Sloane Stephens. 'Some people's lives completely change—you're a superstar, there's media, and so many things to do, so it's more off-court things that affect you on court,' she continues. 'It's so hard to be like, I had the most incredible moment of my life, but I still have to push and be better. That was my biggest struggle,' Stephens shares. Stephens' reflections mirror the research, where goal achievement can lead to a temporary collapse in sense of purpose. After a grand slam title, an NBA championship game, or the Super Bowl, routine and purpose suddenly pause, forcing athletes to confront the void that follows. It can feel like their structured and predictable routines are suddenly gone, which can be destabilizing from an emotional standpoint. The Psychology & Physiology of the Come-Down The mental and emotional come-down after athletes perform at their peak is not only psychological, but also a physiological response. High-pressure situations, like competitions, can put the body into states of hyperarousal, where the body is surging with cortisol, adrenaline, and dopamine. When the stressor, such as the Wimbledon championship, is gone, dopamine levels can then drop, and the nervous system is left to recalibrate. Stephens describes her own experiences after her Grand Slam win: This cycle of high-intensity buildup followed by emotional depletion isn't unique to tennis. Basketball players experience it after the NBA championships, NFL players go through it after the Super Bowl, and Olympians navigate it after the Olympic games. Another psychological factor playing into mental health challenges after winning is the external pressure and expectation to continue winning. Athletes often feel misunderstood by fans and the media, especially during the post-victory blues. Stephens says, 'The expectation is to continue to win. From a fan perspective, they don't know what's going on behind winning.' How to Overcome Post-Competition Blues The good news is that elite athletes and other high-performers can take proactive steps to reduce the chances of mental health disturbances after competition. Self-awareness is an incredibly important skill to develop to get ahead of the psychological impact of victory. Stephens says, 'Being able to identify when you're in this mode of next tournament/ next match—you can lose yourself sometimes. Over the years, I've learned how to care for myself in those ways.' For Stephens, self-awareness has been incredibly important. She uses a strategy she calls the '5 minutes of fury,' where she allows herself a brief window to stay exactly what she's feeling without a filter to get it off her chest to be able to move forward. Another important preventative measure athletes can take is preparing for life after sport. Since many athletes center their entire identity and self-worth around their sport, it leaves them more prone to feeling lost and destabilized when retirement comes. 'I definitely think that athletes are so focused during their careers that they never think there's a life after,' Stephens says. 'Exposing players and athletes to things they might be good at or interested in is a good way to help athletes figure out what they're interested in—giving them an opportunity.' Stephens founded the Sloane Stephens Foundation 12 years ago to provide mental health programming to under-resourced youth. This has truly given her a sense of purpose outside of the game, strengthening her identity beyond her role as a tennis player. Stephens' foundation is being honored at the ESPYs with the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian of the Year Award to mark her impact in creating mental health equity in youth sports. Her story is such a great example of how athletes can find meaning and purpose beyond their sports to better prepare for transitions after grand slams. It gives life meaning and purpose after a big game is over. Sloane Stephens Foundation supports youth mental health. We Need to Redefine Winning The conversation around athlete mental health and well-being is rapidly evolving, yet there's still a lack of understanding regarding what happens after the win. Victory can pose its own set of new psychological challenges, and there should be more resources in place to support athletes not only when they're not meeting expectations, but also when they're exceeding them. That means redefining winning, not just as the moment of triumph, but as the athlete's sustained well-being after the game is over.
Yahoo
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
British Open 2025: Scottie Scheffler reckons with the psychological cost of victory
Tiger Woods didn't just rewrite the golf record book. He rewrote sports psychology too, he and Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan and every other maniacally driven, winning-is-everything athlete who placed their sport above everything else in their life. Now comes Scottie Scheffler, who's very much like Tiger in the record books but so very different from him in terms of psychological makeup. Where Woods would have shoved aside his own mother to win another tournament, Scheffler has a more balanced — and, let's be honest, healthy — view on life, golf and winning. Advertisement 'It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for like a few minutes,' Scheffler said Tuesday morning prior to The Open Championship, which begins Thursday at Royal Portrush. 'It only lasts a few minutes, that kind of euphoric feeling.' He pinpointed his victory at the Byron Nelson earlier this year as an example: 'To win the Byron Nelson Championship at home, I literally worked my entire life to become good at golf to have an opportunity to win that tournament. You win it, you celebrate, get to hug my family, my sister's there, it's such an amazing moment. Then it's like, okay, what are we going to eat for dinner? Life goes on.' Scheffler nailed the essence and the conflict at the heart of golf, or sports in general: there's a huge difference between winning, and fulfillment. 'Is it great to be able to win tournaments and to accomplish the things I have in the game of golf? Yeah, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about because I've literally worked my entire life to be good at this sport,' he said. 'To have that kind of sense of accomplishment, I think, is a pretty cool feeling. To get to live out your dreams is very special, but at the end of the day, I'm not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I'm not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world because what's the point? This is not a fulfilling life. It's fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.' Advertisement And then we get to the Tiger-Kobe-MJ conundrum: What happens when you've achieved everything in your life that you want, and it's not enough. 'There's a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life,' Scheffler said, 'and you get there, you get to No. 1 in the world, and they're like, 'What's the point?'' (For what it's worth, this appears to be what's troubling Rory McIlroy right now in the wake of his epic, career-capping Masters victory.) Scheffler, to his credit, appears to have made peace with the fact that he simultaneously wants to win and knows it won't satisfy him: 'That's something that I wrestle with on a daily basis,' he said. 'It's like showing up at the Masters every year; it's like, why do I want to win this golf tournament so badly? Why do I want to win The Open Championship so badly? I don't know because, if I win, it's going to be awesome for two minutes. Then we're going to get to the next week: 'Hey, you won two majors this year; how important is it for you to win the FedExCup playoffs?' And we're back here again.' What's salvaged Scheffler? According to him, family. 'I'm blessed to be able to come out here and play golf, but if my golf ever started affecting my home life or it ever affected the relationship I have with my wife or my son, that's going to be the last day that I play out here for a living,' he said. 'This is not the be all, end all. This is not the most important thing in my life. That's why I wrestle with, why is this so important to me? Because I'd much rather be a great father than I would be a great golfer. At the end of the day, that's what's more important to me.' Can you even imagine prime Tiger or prime Kobe saying that? Both seemed to work their way around to that philosophy once their most competitive playing days were done, but not while they were in the heart of their careers. Advertisement Scheffler's entire answer is well worth watching in full: 'Playing professional sports is a really weird thing to do,' he said. 'It really is. Just because we put in so much effort, we work so hard for something that's so fleeting. It really is. The feeling of winning just doesn't last that long.' Fortunately for Scheffler, he gets more opportunities than most to enjoy those fleeting moments of victory.
Irish Times
30-06-2025
- Sport
- Irish Times
Denis Walsh: Why Paul O'Connell thinks a sports psychologist will help Ireland get ahead
In his autobiography, The Battle, Paul O'Connell devotes half a dozen pages to a meeting he had with Caroline Currid, the sports psychologist who will join him on Ireland 's summer tour. At the time Currid was taking a psychology course through the Open University, and she approached O'Connell to be one of her case studies. As he was one of the greatest rugby players in the world she expected to find an athlete in control of his mental preparation. What she discovered, however, was that O'Connell was essentially clueless. 'I was shocked by his preparation,' Currid told The Irish Times in 2016. 'I was really going down there thinking that this guy had it sussed and that his preparation would be really good and that I would come away with a lot of detail about sports psychology. But he obviously was doing nothing, and his preparation was not good.' The conversation between them in O'Connell's book is only 17 years old, and yet it captures a faraway place in time. Sports psychology was still not mainstream in Irish sport, even among its elite athletes. READ MORE The basic sources of O'Connell's motivation were self-criticism and emotion. In describing the ways that he goaded himself into performing, he kept returning to negatives: outcomes and feelings that he was trying desperately to avoid. He was leaning on fear: afraid of not performing, of letting people down, of losing. 'Sometimes my body reacts badly in the build-up, especially if it's a big game,' O'Connell told Currid. 'If I throw up before we go out, I know I'm ready.' 'But don't you know,' she said, 'that has a really bad effect on your body? You're losing a huge amount of energy by getting sick. It saps your red blood cells. Even your eyes dilate when you throw up.' 'Jesus. I don't really know why I do it really,' he said. Caroline Currid with Gearóid Hegarty during her time working with Limerick's hurlers. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho And that was the point: he hadn't questioned his homespun techniques. In team meetings with Munster and Ireland, O'Connell was famous for questioning everything. But, through ignorance, he had let this pass. The outcomes in O'Connell's career had been so good that maybe he could see no reason to interrogate it: he had captained Munster to win the Heineken Cup, had captained Ireland and toured with the Lions. It never occurred to him that he had succeeded despite not knowing how to direct his mind. In O'Connell's book, the meeting with Currid ends with a conversation about the World Player of the Year award. He had made the shortlist for the previous season, but the award went to Richie McCaw. Currid asked him, straight out, why he thought he didn't win. 'Well obviously,' he said, 'Richie McCaw is a world-class player. And obviously the judges decided I didn't perform well enough to get picked ahead of him.' 'So,' she said, 'how do you know you wouldn't have got Player of the Year if you'd had a more positive mindset, or if you'd prepared differently?' He didn't have an answer for that. In the same year Currid had asked Mickey Harte if she could work with the Tyrone footballers, as a kind of internship, and, generously, he agreed. O'Connell knew about her involvement and a few weeks after their meeting he watched them winning the All-Ireland. A day later he called Currid, asking if she would work with him. Paul O'Connell used to think that if he didn't get sick before playing, he wasn't fully ready. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho 'I was worried about heading down a new road when things were already going well,' wrote O'Connell, 'but the idea that I could maybe get more out of myself by being open to new things was a more powerful thought.' The thing about sports psychology is that nobody can ever tell how much it will add. In that sense, it involves more risk than going to the gym or filling your GPS tracker with explosive movements. There is no hard data. Winners will often speak about their mentality. But what if the losers had a really good sports psychologist too? Does that mean it didn't work for them? After Limerick 's seismic defeat to Dublin in the hurling quarter-final nine days ago it didn't take long for Currid's absence from Limerick's backroom team to come out in the wash. Nothing was said after they beat Cork by 16 points in this year's Munster championship, or after they torched Clare in last year's Munster final. But when Limerick were masters of the universe, Currid's contribution was regularly lauded by players. Though it was abstract in some ways, all of them felt her input. She applied the cognitive glue. It is a vivid marker of how times have changed when the defeat of an intercounty team might be attributed to the absence of a sports psychologist. Currid was central to that revolution in attitudes, along with Gary Keegan and Niamh Fitzpatrick and Kieran Shannon and a handful of others. Caroline Currid's job is to help players get in the right frame of mind. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho When Limerick won the 2018 All-Ireland her name wasn't listed anywhere in the match programme; when they won it in 2023, she was interviewed on The Sunday Game's evening programme, the first time that the sports psychologist from the All-Ireland champions had been interviewed on that show. Another small barrier had fallen. [ 'Getting the top two inches ready' - How important is sports psychology to breaking a losing habit? Opens in new window ] The line that has gained traction is that Limerick have failed to win the All-Ireland in the three years when she wasn't on board: 2019, 2024 and 2025. What is usually forgotten is that she was also there in 2017, when Limerick crashed before take-off. One of the patterns in Currid's extraordinarily successful career is that breakthroughs have come in her second season: that was true with the Tipperary hurlers in 2010, the Dublin footballers in 2011 and the Limerick hurlers in 2018. By then, trust would have taken root. In 2010, on a training camp with the Tipperary hurlers in Spain, she did a workshop that depended on complete trust. The players were asked to share their biggest fear, and something about their family that nobody in the room would know, first in pairs, and then in front of the group. 'When you went around the group, the amount of f**ked-up sh*t was incredible,' said one Tipperary player. 'But it actually made everyone care more for each other. That's where she was going with it.' It is not a magic potion. Currid spent three years with the Dublin hurlers and a year with Munster rugby without any visible success, though individual testimonies might tell a different story. O'Connell was convinced, though. Currid's role on this tour won't just be about the players.
The Guardian
28-06-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
‘It helped me be free': Madison Keys on therapy, America and her husband as coach
Before she won her first grand slam tournament at the Australian Open in January, Madison Keys had spent more than a year talking to a therapist about her life rather than just her tennis career. 'When I'd gone to see sports psychologists in the past it had been a little tunnel-focused on routines and big moments on the court,' she says on a sleepy Sunday afternoon in London. 'So being able to talk to someone about broader life philosophies helped me get to the root of why I was feeling that way instead of just being uber-focused on decisive moments in a match.' The 30-year-old American, who is ready for another tilt at Wimbledon, remembers some of the wayward suggestions that specialist sports psychiatrists would advise her to follow at crucial stages of a match. 'It would be, like: 'Make sure you look at your strings and do this specific thing and that'll just help the nerves go away.'' Keys pauses when I ask if it was hard to open up to a stranger about her deeper and usually more hidden emotions during a therapy session. 'I don't know if I would say that was hard,' she replies. 'It was more that I was actually trying to be honest with myself about what I felt. There were a lot of instances where I would say something and I was surprised that's actually how I felt. Those are the kind of things that live in the back of your head you don't ever really pay attention to.' She still talks to the same therapist and says: 'One of the biggest things I've learned about myself is that, because of our sport, and our constant striving to be better, there's always something else [to do]. Sometimes you don't really take a moment to acknowledge how you feel or think about what's going on inside. You just put your head down and keep going into the next thing. At some point that catches up with you and so it was really important for me to learn how to actually just sit and be introspective and figure out what I was feeling and why. And then just being OK with that and not immediately trying to fix it and make it go away.' The best tennis players are so consumed by their careers, and life on tour, that it often seems as if their true selves, as people, are forgotten. Did Keys become better at separating her personal identity from her tennis-playing persona? 'I was able to do it more, but there are times when it feels like you've figured it out and things are great only for you to find it's not so simple. 'The hardest part about focusing on your mental health is that you've never done it [completely]. It's never box-checked off, so it's something I'll have to continue to be conscious of, because it's easy to fall into bad habits.' Keys faced a difficult draw in Melbourne and had to win five three-set matches, beating four opponents in the top 10, including Iga Swiatek, world No 2 at the time, in an epic semi-final, and then the world No 1, Aryna Sabalenka. She survived a match point against Swiatek and was pushed to the brink by Sabalenka before winning 7-5 in the third set. 'I was most proud of how I took every round just as that round,' Keys says. 'I was so focused and never got ahead of myself. Playing all these hard matches against top players really allowed me to focus and keep persevering. The fact that I played so many three-setters and was able to hold the trophy at the end of the two weeks was amazing.' Eight years had passed since her only previous slam final when, at the 2017 US Open, she was crushed 6-3, 6-0 by her friend Sloane Stephens. The pressure of the occasion had been too much against Stephens and, in Melbourne, Keys said: 'I've obviously thought of that match endlessly for the past eight years.' So, did her recent therapy help in those clutch moments of her first slam victory? 'It helped me be a lot more free and have a clear mind in the moment,' Keys confirms. 'I was able to force myself to be a little braver in those moments instead of being careful and tentative, and just go for it. It got to the point where a lot of the time you'd rather be brave. Maybe things don't go exactly how you want but you did them on your terms and you feel you have no regrets, versus if you're a little tentative or trying to be careful and it doesn't work out. That's when you really have regret.' That regret had also been felt acutely in the semi-finals of the 2023 US Open. Keys led Sabalenka 6-0, 5-3 but, rather than maintaining her positivity, she became passive and hesitant and lost the match on successive tie-breaks. 'I don't know if that was the exact moment, but obviously it was a tough loss,' Keys says of what prompted her to seek therapy. 'Being in that position and not to be able to cross a line was definitely a kind of final reminder that: 'Oh yes, maybe there's something that we can work on.'' Keys also switched from using a Wilson racket to the larger Yonex and she tweaked her serve, but she admits that, apart from working on her mind, the most positive change in the past two years has been the appointment of her husband, Bjorn Fratangelo, as her coach. 'I was struggling when I asked him to help me out,' Keys recalls of the June 2023 move. 'At the time it was supposed to be short term but then we immediately had success. I think the biggest hurdle for him was being comfortable in telling me what to do. That took time to get used to but, now, we're finding our stride.' Fratangelo was a player who briefly cracked the world top 100 in 2016, but what are his best attributes as a coach? 'He's really great at analysing what's going on [in a match] and he does it so quickly. Coupled with the fact that we obviously know each other very well and know how to communicate, he's able to see some things that I'm not seeing on the court. He then communicates in a way that I can actually do it.' Keys says that as a couple, away from the court, 'we do a pretty good job of balancing things. When we're home, we're very much home and tennis is off. Home is home and work is work. Sometimes it's harder to do than say but, for the most part, we've done a good job.' In the French Open this month Keys looked on course for the semi-finals when she won the first set against Coco Gauff. But she crumbled in the third set of an error-strewn match and her fellow American went on to beat Sabalenka in another dramatic final in Paris. 'I was able to watch the last set,' Keys says, 'and it's so amazing for Coco. I thought I could have won our match but nearly beating someone doesn't actually count.' Keys laughs and then says of Gauff: 'She's playing some great tennis and her clay season was phenomenal. It's obviously disappointing to be so close and then lose to the eventual champion. But at the same time it gives you a lot of confidence.' Wimbledon is next and it is a tournament where she has reached two quarter-finals. In 2015 she beat Petra Kvitova and Venus Williams before losing to Serena Williams while, eight years later, she lost to Sabalenka in the quarters. Last year was even more painful when, in the fourth round, she was 5-2 up in the third set and two points from victory against Jasmine Paolini. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion 'I then tore my hamstring,' Keys says with a grimace. She retired at 5-5 and Paolini went on to make the final. 'Hopefully this is the year I make it past the quarters because Wimbledon has always been something that I dreamed of. It has this aura which means that, I think, for all tennis players it's the tournament.' It's hard to believe that Keys, a teenage prodigy, has been playing professionally since she was 14. 'I feel every one of those past 16 years,' she says with a groaning kind of laugh. Staying in Chelsea for a change, Keys reveals: 'I wish I could say I'll be doing some sightseeing but I'd be lying if I feel like that actually might happen. But it's been nice to see a different part of London. I'm notorious for being stuck at Wimbledon all the years I've been here, so it's fun just to be in another part of the city.' What would she most like to do in London? 'When I'm in a big city I've always really loved doing that touristy bus thing where you can kind of see everything in one trip. If I have an afternoon off that would be the one thing I'd love to do – just hop on a bus and see all of the sights at least once.' Kindness Wins is the non-profit foundation she set up in 2020 and its very name offers insight into her character and philosophy of life. 'It means a lot to me,' she says, 'because tennis has brought so much into my life and it's opened so many doors for me. I felt it was important to also give kids that opportunity because tennis teaches so many important life lessons. It helps kids learn those in a way where they can be competitive but also a good sport. 'So I wanted to make sure that I did whatever I could to make tennis more accessible for as many people that wanted to play it. Tennis also gives so many opportunities to go to college and meet new people – but it's a really expensive sport. So we try to help.' The world seems short of kindness right now so how does she feel as an American living under Donald Trump? 'It's definitely a tough time and it's hard to balance where you want to be informed and know what's going on but, at the same time, it's crazy. 'Sometimes it's hard to shut it off enough that you don't pull your hair out but also not being oblivious to what's going on and the realities of everything. It's definitely difficult at the moment.' Keys smiles ruefully when I say that there are just three and a half more years of Trump's presidency to survive. 'I know. After a few months I was like: 'Oh, it's only been a few weeks!'' At least the first month of Trump's return to the Oval Office also marked her victory at the Australian Open. Keys grins more broadly when I ask if the reality of winning her first grand slam lived up to the dream she had pursued for so long. 'It was great,' she says with another pealing laugh. 'Being able to do it with that group of people around me was really special. So, yes, it was just pretty great.'
The Guardian
27-06-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
‘It helped me be free': Madison Keys on therapy, Donald Trump and her husband as coach
Before she won her first grand slam tournament at the Australian Open in January, Madison Keys had spent more than a year talking to a therapist about her life rather than just her tennis career. 'When I'd gone to see sports psychologists in the past it had been a little tunnel-focused on routines and big moments on the court,' she says on a sleepy Sunday afternoon in London. 'So being able to talk to someone about broader life philosophies helped me get to the root of why I was feeling that way instead of just being uber-focused on decisive moments in a match.' The 30-year-old American, who is ready for another tilt at Wimbledon, remembers some of the wayward suggestions that specialist sports psychiatrists would advise her to follow at crucial stages of a match. 'It would be, like: 'Make sure you look at your strings and do this specific thing and that'll just help the nerves go away.'' Keys pauses when I ask if it was hard to open up to a stranger about her deeper and usually more hidden emotions during a therapy session. 'I don't know if I would say that was hard,' she replies. 'It was more that I was actually trying to be honest with myself about what I felt. There were a lot of instances where I would say something and I was surprised that's actually how I felt. Those are the kind of things that live in the back of your head you don't ever really pay attention to.' She still talks to the same therapist and says: 'One of the biggest things I've learned about myself is that, because of our sport, and our constant striving to be better, there's always something else [to do]. Sometimes you don't really take a moment to acknowledge how you feel or think about what's going on inside. You just put your head down and keep going into the next thing. At some point that catches up with you and so it was really important for me to learn how to actually just sit and be introspective and figure out what I was feeling and why. And then just being OK with that and not immediately trying to fix it and make it go away.' The best tennis players are so consumed by their careers, and life on tour, that it often seems as if their true selves, as people, are forgotten. Did Keys become better at separating her personal identity from her tennis-playing persona? 'I was able to do it more but there are times when it feels like you've figured it out and things are great only for you to find it's not so simple. The hardest part about focusing on your mental health is that you've never done it [completely]. It's never box-checked off so it's something I'll have to continue to be conscious of, because it's easy to fall into bad habits.' Keys faced a difficult draw in Melbourne and had to win five three-set matches, beating four opponents in the top 10, including the world No 2, Iga Swiatek, in an epic semi-final and the world No 1, Aryna Sabalenka, in the final. She survived a match point against Swiatek and was pushed to the brink by Sabalenka before winning 7-5 in the third set. 'I was most proud of how I took every round just as that round,' Keys says. 'I was so focused and never got ahead of myself. Playing all these hard matches against top players really allowed me to focus and keep persevering. The fact that I played so many three-setters and was able to hold the trophy at the end of the two weeks was amazing.' Eight years had passed since her only previous grand slam final when, at the 2017 US Open, she was crushed 6-3, 6-0 by her friend Sloane Stephens. The pressure of the occasion had been too much against Stephens and, in Melbourne, Keys said: 'I've obviously thought of that match endlessly for the past eight years.' So did her recent therapy sessions help in those clutch moments of her first grand slam victory? 'It helped me be a lot more free and have a clear mind in the moment,' Keys confirms. 'I was able to force myself to be a little braver in those moments instead of being careful and tentative, and just go for it. It got to the point where a lot of the time you'd rather be brave. Maybe things don't go exactly how you want but you did them on your terms and you feel you have no regrets, versus if you're a little tentative or trying to be careful and it doesn't work out. That's when you really have regret.' That regret had also been felt acutely in the semi-finals of the 2023 US Open. Keys led Sabalenka 6-0, 5-3 but, rather than maintaining her positivity, she became passive and hesitant and lost the match on successive tie-breaks. 'I don't know if that was the exact moment, but obviously it was a tough loss,' Keys says of what prompted her to seek therapy. 'Being in that position and not to be able to cross a line was definitely a kind of final reminder that: 'Oh yes, maybe there's something that we can work on.'' Keys also switched from using a Wilson racket to the larger Yonex and she tweaked her serve, but she admits that, apart from working on her mind, the most positive change in the last two years has been the appointment of her husband, Bjorn Fratangelo, as her coach. 'I was struggling when I asked him to help me out,' Keys recalls of the June 2023 move. 'At the time it was supposed to be short-term but then we immediately had success. I think the biggest hurdle for him was being comfortable in telling me what to do. That took time to get used to but, now, we're finding our stride.' Fratangelo was a former player who briefly cracked the world top 100 in 2016, but what are his best attributes as a coach? 'He's really great at analysing what's going on [in a match] and he does it so quickly. Coupled with the fact that we obviously know each other very well and know how to communicate, he's able to see some things that I'm not seeing on the court. He then communicates in a way that I can actually do it.' Keys says that as a couple, away from the court, 'we do a pretty good job of balancing things. When we're home, we're very much home and tennis is off. Home is home and work is work. Sometimes it's harder to do than say but, for the most part, we've done a good job.' In the French Open this month Keys looked on course for the semi-finals when she won the first set against Coco Gauff. But she crumbled in the third set of an error-strewn match and her fellow American went on to beat Sabalenka in another dramatic final in Paris. 'I was able to watch the last set,' Keys says, 'and it's so amazing for Coco. I thought I could have won our match but nearly beating someone doesn't actually count.' Keys laughs and then says of Gauff: 'She's playing some great tennis and her clay season was phenomenal. It's obviously disappointing to be so close and then lose to the eventual champion. But at the same time it gives you a lot of confidence.' Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Wimbledon is next and it is a tournament where she has reached two quarter-finals. In 2015 she beat Petra Kvitova and Venus Williams before losing to Serena Williams while, eight years later, she lost to Sabalenka in the quarters. Last year was even more painful when, in the fourth round, she was 5-2 up in the third set and two points from victory against Jasmine Paolini. 'I then tore my hamstring,' Keys says with a grimace. She retired at 5-5 and Paolini went on to make the final. 'Hopefully this is the year I make it past the quarters because Wimbledon has always been something that I dreamed of. It has this aura which means that, I think, for all tennis players it's the tournament.' It's hard to believe that Keys, a teenage prodigy, has been playing professionally since she was 14. 'I feel every one of those past 16 years,' she says with a groaning kind of laugh. Staying in Chelsea for a change, Keys reveals: 'I wish I could say I'll be doing some sightseeing but I'd be lying if I feel like that actually might happen. But it's been nice to see a different part of London. I'm notorious for being stuck at Wimbledon all the years I've been here, so it's fun just to be in another part of the city.' What would she most like to do in London? 'When I'm in a big city I've always really loved doing that touristy bus thing where you can kind of see everything in one trip. If I have an afternoon off that would be the one thing I'd love to do – just hop on a bus and see all of the sights at least once.' Kindness Wins is the non-profit foundation Keys set up in 2020 and its very name offers insight into her character and philosophy of life. 'It means a lot to me,' she says, 'because tennis has brought so much into my life and it's opened so many doors for me. I felt it was important to also give kids that opportunity because tennis teaches so many important life lessons. It helps kids learn those in a way where they can be competitive but also a good sport. 'So I wanted to make sure that I did whatever I could to make tennis more accessible for as many people that wanted to play it. Tennis also gives so many opportunities to go to college and meet new people – but it's obviously a really expensive sport. So we try to help.' The world seems short of kindness right now so how does she feel as an American living under Donald Trump? 'It's definitely a tough time and it's hard to balance where you want to be informed and know what's going on but, at the same time, it's crazy. Sometimes it's hard to shut it off enough that you don't pull your hair out but also not being oblivious to what's going on and the realities of everything. It's definitely difficult at the moment.' Keys smiles ruefully when I say that there are just three and a half more years of Trump's presidency to survive. 'I know. After a few months I was like: 'Oh it's only been a few weeks!'' At least the first month of Trump's return to the Oval Office also marked her victory at the Australian Open. Keys grins more broadly when I ask if the reality of winning her first grand slam lived up to the dream she had pursued for so long. 'It was great,' she says with another pealing laugh. 'Being able to do it with that group of people around me was really special. So, yes, it was just pretty great.'
