Brazil Has a Tennis Tournament This Week and Its Biggest Star Is Not Playing

A tennis tournament opened in São Paulo on Monday, in a public park where joggers go past the fence and the city noise never quite stops, and the one name everybody in Brazil wanted on the draw sheet was not on it.

The SP Open runs from 14 to 20 September at Parque Villa-Lobos. It is only the second edition, a WTA 250, the smallest tier the women play for, and it is the sort of event that lives or dies on the local crowd turning up. Leylah Fernandez of Canada is the top seed. Paula Badosa of Spain is second. Both are proper players and both deserve their billing. But if you had asked anyone in São Paulo a year ago who would be walking onto that centre court in 2026 with the stands full and the whole place shouting one syllable at her, they would all have given you the same answer.

Bia.

Beatriz Haddad Maia is not there. She is not injured, she has not retired, and she has not been left out. She stopped playing in early August, of her own accord, and told the world in a video she filmed herself. The reason she gave was not her back or her knee or her shoulder. It was her head.

The player Brazil had been waiting sixty years for

If you only watch the Slams, you have almost certainly seen her without knowing much about her. She is hard to miss. One metre eighty-five, left-handed, a two-handed backhand she hits flat and heavy, and a way of walking between points with her shoulders back that makes her look like she is in charge even when she is losing.

Born in São Paulo in May 1996, good early, and then a long unglamorous grind through the lower tiers of the tour — the ITF events, the qualifying draws, the years when nobody is watching and the flights are the worst part of the week.

And then, in the early 2020s, everything landed at once.

In the summer of 2022 she won Nottingham and Birmingham back to back, on grass, a surface nobody had ever expected a Brazilian left-hander to be dangerous on. The Nottingham final went to three sets against Alison Riske. The Birmingham final ended with Zhang Shuai retiring at 5-4. Two titles in eight days, and suddenly she was not a promising outsider any more, she was seeded.

Then came Paris, 2023, and eleven days that Brazil is still talking about.

Three hours and fifty-one minutes

Her fourth round at Roland Garros that year was against Sara Sorribes Tormo, and if you want a single match to understand what kind of competitor Haddad Maia is, it is that one. Sorribes Tormo is the most stubborn retriever in the women's game. Nothing comes back cheap. The match lasted three hours and fifty-one minutes, the longest women's match of the whole tournament, and Haddad Maia won it 6-7(3), 6-3, 7-5, serving out a set that had been on serve for forty minutes.

Two days later she played Ons Jabeur, then one of the best players in the world, and lost the first set. She won the next two 7-6(5) and 6-1. When the last ball dropped she stood on Philippe Chatrier with her hands on her head, and in Brazil people who do not watch tennis were watching tennis.

She was the first Brazilian woman to reach a Roland Garros semi-final in the Open era. She lost that semi-final to Iga Swiatek, who won the title, and a few days later, on 12 June 2023, she became the first Brazilian woman ever to be ranked inside the world top ten. World number ten. A number that had stood empty in Brazilian women's tennis since the era of black and white photographs.

What that number meant at home

You need to know what she was carrying, because it explains the rest.

Brazil has produced two of the most beloved figures the sport has ever had, and then a long silence. Maria Esther Bueno won seven Grand Slam singles titles between 1959 and 1966, three at Wimbledon and four in New York, and played the kind of tennis people wrote poetry about. Gustavo Kuerten, Guga, won Roland Garros in 1997, 2000 and 2001, became the first South American man to be ranked number one in the world, and drew a heart in the clay with his racquet in a moment that is still on the wall of half the tennis clubs in the country.

After that, for two decades, almost nothing at the very top. There was a beautiful exception in Tokyo, when Laura Pigossi and Luisa Stefani saved four straight match points and won Brazil its first Olympic tennis medal, a bronze in the women's doubles, 4-6, 6-4, 11-9, both of them in tears before it was even over. But in singles, the space where a Brazilian contender should have been stayed empty.

Haddad Maia filled it alone. For three years she was the entire answer to the question "who does Brazil have?" — every press conference, every home tie, every exhibition, every sponsor day, every kid in a queue with a marker pen. The men's game now has João Fonseca, who has settled into the world's top thirty and set off a genuine tennis boom at home, with children turning up at academies because of him. But when Haddad Maia was at her peak, there was no Fonseca yet. There was her.

Nobody hands you a manual for that.

The ten months nobody expected

There is a chapter of her career that gets summarised badly, so here it is properly.

In June 2019, at a small tournament in Bol, in Croatia, she gave a urine sample that came back positive for two banned substances from the SARM family. She was provisionally suspended from 22 July that year. She denied taking anything knowingly, and then the supplements themselves were tested.

They were five custom preparations made up by a compounding pharmacy in São Paulo, prescribed by two sports medicine doctors. The prohibited substances were in them. She had correspondence showing she had tried to check. The ITF accepted her explanation, accepted that she bore no significant fault or negligence, and gave her ten months rather than the years such a finding can carry. She was eligible to play again in May 2020, by which point the tour had shut down for the pandemic anyway.

That is not a footnote. That is a young player losing nearly a year of her career and a large part of her public reputation to something she did not choose, at the age when careers are supposed to be taking off. What she did afterwards — the grass titles, Paris, the top ten — happened on the other side of it.

If you have read our piece on Grigor Dimitrov and the long way back, you will recognise the shape of it. The sport is full of people who have already come back from something once, and then are asked to do it again.

The part that came apart slowly

Nothing dramatic happened. That is what makes it worth writing about.

The 2025 season was hard. She lost twenty-six of her forty-two matches. In September, in Seoul, something happened in a match that got a small amount of coverage and should have got more: she had trouble breathing on court, her hands were shaking as she sat in her chair between games, and a physiotherapist came out to check her blood pressure. And then she kept playing. Of course she kept playing. That is what the job trains you to do.

A week or so later she posted that she was ending her 2025 season earlier than planned, in her words, to rest her body and mind for a longer period. Elina Svitolina announced something similar in the same stretch of days, which is its own small story about how the autumn grinds people down — we wrote about Svitolina's remarkable second act in her Toronto run this summer at thirty-one.

Haddad Maia came back for 2026. It did not work. She won four matches all year and lost nineteen. In May her ranking fell outside the top hundred for the first time in five years. By Wimbledon she was 134 in the world and playing on the outside courts, and on 30 June, on Court 9, she lost 6-3, 6-2 to a qualifier, Maria Timofeeva, in a match that took a little over an hour.

That turned out to be the last match she has played.

The video

In early August she posted a video to Instagram. No press conference, no management company. She filmed it and put it up.

She said she would not be competing again this season. She said the decision was one she had been dealing with mentally for a few months, privately, before saying it out loud. She used a phrase that has been quoted everywhere since, and it is worth sitting with rather than skimming: her relationship with tennis has not been easy.

Read that as a professional athlete's sentence, not a caption. This is a woman who has spent roughly twenty-five years of her life inside this sport, who broke a sixty-year drought for her country, who has been the face of tennis in a nation of two hundred million people, and what she is describing is a relationship. Relationships get strained. Sometimes they need distance before they can be repaired.

She also said she intends to come back in 2027, using a protected ranking.

What a protected ranking actually is

This is one of those bits of tour machinery that sounds like paperwork and is actually mercy.

Rankings are built from the last fifty-two weeks of results. Stop playing and your points fall off week by week until there is nothing left, which would mean a returning player has to start again from the very bottom, in qualifying draws at tiny events, thousands of miles from the tour she left. Almost nobody can climb back through that.

So the rules allow a player who is out for at least six months to freeze the ranking she had when she stopped, and use that frozen number to enter a limited quota of tournaments when she returns. Haddad Maia was ranked in the mid one-fifties when she stopped playing, so that is roughly the number she will carry back. It does not get her into a Grand Slam main draw. It does get her a real entry list at real tournaments instead of a cold start, which is the difference between a comeback and a fantasy.

The rule exists mostly because of injuries and pregnancies. That it now covers a player stepping away to look after her mind is quietly one of the more decent things about modern tennis, and it is very new. Twenty years ago there was no vocabulary for this at all. You were injured, or you were finished, and if you were struggling you called it a back problem because that was a reason people accepted.

The players who came back

If your instinct is that this is the end of her story, the recent history of the women's tour argues otherwise, and it argues hard.

In May 2023, Amanda Anisimova wrote that she had been struggling with her mental health and burnout since the previous summer, that being at tournaments had become unbearable, and that she was stepping away. She was twenty-one. She put the racquets down for four months, spent time with her family and did a lot of painting, and plenty of people quietly assumed that was that.

In 2025 she reached the Wimbledon final. Then she reached the US Open final. Two major finals in one summer, from the player who could not face a locker room two years earlier. She lost both, one of them 6-0, 6-0 in a way that would have broken someone with less in them, and came back again the following week.

That is the honest counterweight to the gloom around Haddad Maia's announcement. Time away from tennis is not the same thing as the end of tennis. Sometimes it is the only thing that makes the rest of a career possible. If you want the gentler, everyday version of the same idea, we have written about what the court gives back when you stop treating it as a battlefield — it applies to the people in the folding chairs as much as to the people in the rankings.

São Paulo, this week, without her

So what is actually happening at Parque Villa-Lobos while all this sits in the background?

A good little tournament, is the answer. Fernandez is a former US Open finalist with a left-handed game and a taste for a fight. Badosa has been ranked as high as number two in the world. There are qualifiers who have flown in from three continents for a draw of thirty-two, and there is a Brazilian crowd, which is the real point. South American tennis crowds do not behave like tennis crowds elsewhere. They sing. They start things in the middle of rallies. They treat a WTA 250 in a city park like a football night.

Last year, in the very first edition, Haddad Maia was the top seed and the entire reason the tickets sold. She beat her compatriot Laura Pigossi in the last sixteen and then lost in the quarter-finals to Renata Zarazúa of Mexico, 7-6(5), 6-3, in front of a crowd that had spent the whole week waiting for a final they never got. The title went to Tiantsoa Rakotomanga Rajaonah of France, who was ranked outside the top two hundred and who nobody in the park had come to see.

This year, there is not even that. There is a draw sheet with no Brazilian at the top of it, and a tournament that will be perfectly good and slightly quieter than it should be.

And that gap in São Paulo is the clearest picture anyone could draw of what one player means to a country. The tennis calendar does not stop for her. It never stops for anyone — if you want to know what is filling the next ten weeks now that New York is over, we laid out the whole strange autumn in our guide to the season after the US Open. The Asian swing will arrive, the indoor season will arrive, the year-end finals will arrive, and by January the sport will be somewhere else entirely.

What you can do with a story like this

Nothing, is the honest answer, and that is an uncomfortable thing for a fan to sit with. You cannot fix it, you cannot cheer her back onto the court, and the worst thing anybody can do with an athlete who has said she needs quiet is demand a timetable from her.

What you can do is adjust what you think you are watching.

Most of us consume this sport as a results service. A name wins, a name loses, the ranking moves, the next tournament starts. The player is a set of numbers that goes up or down and we feel entitled to an explanation when the numbers go the wrong way. Haddad Maia has just told us, as plainly as anyone in tennis has told us in years, that the numbers were coming from a person who was not all right, for longer than any of us noticed, while she kept turning up and playing anyway.

The next time you see a top-fifty player lose badly in a first round, that is worth remembering. You are watching one bad hour of a life you know nothing about.

Brazilian tennis will be fine. Fonseca is pulling a generation of kids into the sport, the SP Open will be back next September, and somewhere in a club in São Paulo there is a twelve-year-old with a left-handed forehand who watched Paris in 2023 and decided.

But there is a specific thing worth holding onto about this week. Tennis asked Bia Haddad Maia for everything she had for the better part of a decade — the comeback, the top ten, the flag, the whole weight of a country's expectations on one pair of shoulders — and when she finally had nothing left, she said so out loud, in her own words, on her own account, with no medical excuse to hide behind.

That took more nerve than any three-hour-fifty-one-minute match she ever won. The trophy cabinet will not record it. It should.

Photo: an empty hard court seen from above, its paint cracked by the sun, the lines still perfectly drawn.