Aryna Sabalenka has pulled out of Wimbledon hours before her first-round tie against Emina Bektas. The two-time semi-finalist was due to play second on Court 1 but she has been replaced by lucky loser Erika Andreeva.
Sabalenka booked a one-hour practice session at SW19 earlier in the day but left the court with her boyfriend after just 20 minutes.
The Australian Open champion has been struggling with a shoulder injury and did not practice any serves.
“Heartbroken to have to tell you all that I won’t be able to play the Championships this year,” Sabalenka said.
“This tournament means so much to me and I promise I’ll be back stronger than ever next year.”
Sabalenka was the third seed at SW19 and she is the second seed to pull out today after Emma Raducanu’s opponent, Ekaterina Alexandrova, withdrew.
Sabalenka cast doubt on her participation when she held her pre-tournament press conference on Saturday.
She said: “It’s teres major. Like shoulder. For someone who doesn’t speak very well English, I call it just shoulder injury. It’s really a specific injury, and it’s really a rare one. Probably I’m just the second or the third tennis player who injured that muscle.
“Yeah, that’s a very frustrating one. The most annoying thing is that I can do anything. I can practice, I can hit my groundstrokes. I’m struggling with serving. That’s really annoying. You don’t feel like you’re injured.
“If you give me some weights, I’m going to go lift some weights. But if you tell me to serve, I’m going to go through pain. We did an MRI, we did everything. We did a lot of rehab, a lot of treatments and everything.”
Sabalenka has already pulled out of the Olympic Games later this month to focus on getting fit for the US Open.
“It’s really sad to skip Olympics this year. But really, I’m really looking forward for the next one. I really hope that I’ll be able to, yeah, play my next Olympics,” she added.
“The main thing that I made this decision was that the scheduling was really tough. Recently I’ve been struggling with a lot of things health-wise, injury-wise. My body is kind of, like, showing that I have to take care of myself.
“Yeah, I just decided to sacrifice Olympics for my career, for my health actually.”
