Bianca Andreescu: ‘I literally wanted to quit this sport. But my soul knew differently’

When asked how she feels about being back on court, Bianca Andreescu’s voice rings with the rehearsed precision of someone who knew this question was coming. The 22-year-old Canadian tennis player feels great. She feels ready, focused, fresh. She knows she pulled out of the Cincinnati Western & Southern Open on short notice earlier this month, but it’s helped her get ready to play the US Open. She was able to train, and regroup, and at the end of the day, she’s very glad she made the decision. As for the other decision, the one more complex, and painful, and consequential to the numbers and rankings that count in the life of a professional tennis player – the decision to take six months off in December of 2021 – she lets it fly.

“I literally wanted to quit this sport. It was so bad,” Andreescu tells the Guardian over the phone, the day before she heads to New York for the US Open. “I didn’t want to hear about tennis, or think about tennis, or anything even close to it for the first three months I was away. And then, after three months, I realized, ‘Oh shit, I really do miss this. And I need it in my life.’”

The way she tells it, there wasn’t just one thing that caused Andreescu to take her leave. She didn’t play at all in 2020. Fresh on the heels of her 2019 US Open victory, her first grand slam title at the age of 19, she tore the meniscus in her knee. She withdrew from the 2020 Australian Open to tend to the injury. Two months later, the world shut down and pro tours were suspended. Though she’d originally planned to play the rescheduled 2020 French Open, she withdrew ahead of the tournament to focus on her training and her health. She went into 2021 “very, very hungry, and very, very motivated to be back”, but in