Amanda Anisimova: The Courage to Walk Away

On a warm afternoon at Wimbledon last summer, Amanda Anisimova lost a Grand Slam final by the cruellest scoreline the sport allows: 6-0, 6-0. A double bagel, they call it — not a single game won, on the biggest stage of her life, in front of the whole tennis world. On the surface it looked like the most brutal humiliation imaginable, the kind of afternoon that could break a player for good. And yet, if you knew where Anisimova had been in the two years before she walked onto that court, you understood something the scoreline could never show: that simply being there at all was one of the most remarkable comebacks in modern tennis.

Because two years earlier, Amanda Anisimova had walked away from the sport entirely. She had stopped, indefinitely, at a moment when many assumed her career was quietly ending — put down her racket, told the world her mental health mattered more, and disappeared. That she came back at all was a surprise. That she came back and reached a Wimbledon final was very nearly a miracle. This is the story of the bravest thing a tennis player can do, which is to admit that they cannot go on — and of what happened when she found her way back.

The prodigy

To understand the fall, you have to see how high she started. Anisimova was one of those American prodigies who arrive fully formed and terrifying, a teenager hitting the ball harder and flatter and earlier than players a decade older. In 2019, still only seventeen, she reached the semi-finals of the French Open — beating a reigning Grand Slam champion along the way — and announced herself as the next great hope of American women's tennis. The ball came off her racket like it had been fired. The ceiling looked limitless.

That is the version of Anisimova the sport fell in love with first: young, fearless, ferociously gifted, seemingly destined for the very top and in a hurry to get there. In the ordinary run of tennis fairytales, the semi-final at seventeen is the beginning of a long climb toward number one. Hers was about to become something much darker and much more human, because within months of that breakthrough, the bottom fell out of her world.

The year everything broke

In the summer of 2019, just before the US Open, Anisimova's father died. Konstantin Anisimov was not only her dad; he was her coach, the person who had guided her tennis from the beginning, the central figure in her sporting life and her actual life at once. He suffered a heart attack and was suddenly, shockingly gone. She was eighteen years old.

It is almost impossible to overstate what that does to a young athlete. Everything about her career — the practices, the travel, the plans, the very reason she picked up a racket — had her father woven through it, and now she had to keep walking onto courts, in front of crowds, inside the exact world that reminded her most of him, while carrying a grief most adults never have to face so young. She kept playing, because that is what you do, because the tour does not stop. But something essential had been knocked loose, and it would take years, and a great deal of pain, before she understood what.

Burning out

What followed was not a dramatic collapse but a slow, grinding erosion — the kind that is harder to see and harder to talk about. The results wobbled. The joy drained away. The thing she had been effortlessly, gloriously good at started to feel like a weight, and then like a cage. Grief and pressure and expectation and exhaustion braided together into something that had a name she was not yet ready to say out loud: burnout.

This is the part of elite sport the highlight reels hide. From the outside, a struggling young star looks like a technical problem — a forehand gone wrong, a ranking slipping, a slump to be coached out of. From the inside, it can be something far heavier: a person slowly losing the ability to enjoy, or even tolerate, the one thing their entire identity is built around. Anisimova was still only in her early twenties, still supposedly in the foothills of her career, and she was quietly running on empty. And in May 2023, after a first-round loss, she finally did the thing almost nobody in her position has the courage to do. She stopped.

The bravest thing she did

Anisimova announced that she was taking an indefinite break from tennis for her mental health. She did not dress it up or set a return date. She said, in effect, that she was not okay, that she had been struggling for a long time, and that she needed to step away from the sport to look after herself. Then she did exactly that: she did not touch a racket for months, let her ranking tumble out of the top four hundred, and simply lived, off the court, as a young woman rather than a tennis machine.

It is hard to convey how radical that decision was, because the culture of professional sport treats stepping away as a kind of surrender. Athletes are trained, from childhood, to push through — to play hurt, to play sad, to never, ever admit the tank is empty. To walk away at the age Anisimova did, with her ranking and her earning years apparently draining by the week, looked to many like career suicide. It was, in fact, the opposite. It was the single most self-preserving, clear-eyed thing she could have done: recognising that a person cannot pour from an empty cup, and choosing herself over the machine. The courage was not in playing on. The courage was in stopping.

What the break actually looked like

There is a temptation to imagine a mental-health break as something dramatic — a clinic, a crisis, a montage of recovery set to swelling music. For Anisimova it seems to have looked, mostly, like ordinary life, which may be exactly the point. Away from the tour she did the normal things a young woman in her early twenties almost never gets to do: she stayed in one place, spent time with the people she loved, and pursued things that had nothing whatsoever to do with hitting a ball. She has spoken about painting and art becoming an outlet during that time, a way to express something the court never let her, and about simply remembering who she was when she was not a ranking and a results sheet.

That is what healing usually looks like in real life — not one cinematic breakthrough but the slow, unglamorous work of becoming a person again. For years Anisimova had been an athlete first and a human being somewhere much further down the list; the break let her put that order back the right way round. And it turns out that a rested, contented person tends to play better tennis than a hollowed-out one, a truth the sport keeps having to relearn the hard way. She did not come back in spite of taking time away from the game. She came back because of it.

Why it mattered beyond her

Anisimova was not doing this in a vacuum. She stepped away during a period when tennis, and sport in general, was being forced into a long-overdue reckoning with athlete mental health — a conversation that Naomi Osaka pushed to the centre of the game when she spoke openly about her own struggles, and that a generation of younger players have refused to let fade. The old code of suffering in silence was finally cracking, and players were beginning to say the quiet part aloud: that being the best in the world at a sport does not make you immune to being a struggling human being.

Anisimova became part of that shift simply by being honest. Every time a prominent athlete says "I am not okay, and I am going to step away," it makes it a fraction easier for the next one — and for the millions of ordinary people watching who are quietly fighting the same battle. Her break was personal, but its meaning was collective. It is why, as we have written before about the mental side of tennis, the most important matches a player fights are often the ones nobody sees, and why the sport is slowly, belatedly learning to treat the mind as seriously as the body.

The comeback

Here is where the story turns, because Anisimova did something that mental-health breaks are not supposed to allow: she came back better. Late in 2023 she announced she would return at the start of the new season, and when she did, the difference was visible. She talked about feeling refreshed, about enjoying being on court again, about relishing every second she had once spent years grimly enduring. The weight had lifted. The game was fun again.

And the results followed the joy, not the other way around. From a ranking outside the top four hundred, she climbed — fast. In 2025 she won a WTA 1000 title, one of the biggest events below the Grand Slams, proof that this was not a sentimental feel-good return but a genuine competitive resurgence. The player who had walked away burnt out came back and started beating the best in the world again. Whatever she had gone away to find, she had clearly found it.

The 6-0, 6-0 final

Which brings us back to that Wimbledon final. In 2025, less than two years after she could not bear to hold a racket, Anisimova reached the final of the most famous tournament on earth — her first Grand Slam final, at the place every player dreams of. Simply getting there, given where she had been, was a triumph that should have been celebrated for a week on its own.

Then Iga Swiatek beat her 6-0, 6-0. It was a shattering scoreline, one of the most one-sided major finals in living memory, and it would have been easy for the watching world to file the day under disaster. But there are two ways to read a 6-0, 6-0 final. One is humiliation. The other is this: a young woman who had quit the sport, grieving and burnt out and ranked in the hundreds, had clawed her way back not just to relevance but to a Grand Slam final — and ran, on the day, into one of the best players of her generation playing near-perfect tennis. The scoreline was brutal. The journey to be standing there to receive it was extraordinary. Anisimova, for her part, handled the loss with a grace that told you everything about how far she had come. The old version might have been destroyed by it. This one had already survived worse.

Back again

And now she is back at Wimbledon once more, still competing at the sharp end of the sport, still standing on the courts that once felt unbearable. Whatever happens for her this fortnight — a deep run or an early exit — the meaning of her presence does not depend on the result. Every match Anisimova plays is a quiet argument that stepping away is not the end of a career but sometimes the thing that saves it; that a person can break, and grieve, and stop, and still find their way back to the thing they love.

She may yet win the Grand Slam that her talent has always promised; she has the game for it, and now, crucially, the health and the joy to sustain a run at it. Or she may not. But she has already delivered the more important victory, the one that has nothing to do with trophies: she is still here, still playing, still standing, on her own terms. In a sport that grinds so many bright young talents into dust, that is its own kind of championship.

What is certain, and what is admiration

For the record: Amanda Anisimova reached the French Open semi-finals at seventeen in 2019; her father and coach, Konstantin, died of a heart attack that same year; she took an indefinite mental-health break from tennis in 2023, letting her ranking fall outside the top four hundred; she returned in 2024, won a WTA 1000 title, and reached the 2025 Wimbledon final, where she lost to Iga Swiatek 6-0, 6-0. All of that is documented fact.

What is admiration rather than fact is the reading of it — the sense that her greatest achievement is not any single result but the decision, in her lowest year, to protect herself. Reasonable people can debate whether she will ever lift a major. Nobody who understands what she went through can doubt that she has already won something harder. Her story is not really about tennis. It is about what it costs to be very young and very gifted and very sad all at once, and about the rare courage it takes to say so.

The last word

There is a lesson buried in Amanda Anisimova's story that reaches far beyond a tennis court, and it is worth saying plainly: sometimes the strongest thing a person can do is stop. Not quit forever, not give up — just stop, long enough to heal, and trust that the thing you love will still be there when you are ready to return to it. For Anisimova it was there, waiting, and she came back to it stronger than she left.

It is a message that reaches far beyond tennis, to anyone who has ever felt they had to keep going while everything inside them wanted to stop. You do not have to burn yourself down to prove that you care. Sometimes the most committed thing you can do — for your work, your talent, your life — is to step back from it long enough to remember why you loved it in the first place. Anisimova learned that the hardest possible way, and then found the courage to act on it.

So watch her at Wimbledon, and do not measure the day by the scoreline. Somewhere in that focused, ferocious hitter is an eighteen-year-old who lost her father, a young woman who lost her love of the game, and a player brave enough to walk away and find it again. Whatever the draw does to her this fortnight, she has already told the rest of us something the trophies never could: that surviving is its own victory, and that coming back is the bravest shot in the sport.

Sources

• CBS News and ESPN: Amanda Anisimova walked away from tennis in 2023 due to burnout, took a mental-health break in May 2023, did not touch a racket for months, and saw her ranking fall outside the top 400 before returning
• Wikipedia and tour reporting: Anisimova reached the 2019 French Open semi-final at 17; her father and coach Konstantin Anisimov died of a heart attack in 2019
• USTA and ESPN: Anisimova "refreshed" after her 2023 break, returning in 2024 and rebuilding her ranking; her 2025 WTA 1000 title
• Wimbledon 2025 final: Iga Swiatek def. Amanda Anisimova 6-0, 6-0, Anisimova's maiden Grand Slam final

Photo: Amanda Anisimova at the 2024 DC Open / Hameltion / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0