Professional tennis Players are generally well used to traveling with an excessive quantity of loudly baggage and luggage while they fly around the world, from the tournament to a tournament.
However, return to the United States from Melbourne, Madison Keys had an article that she had never tried to go up before on a plane: a Grand Slam trophy.
More specifically, important women Australian Open Trophy, which Keys won on Saturday by a superb title champion Aryna Sabalenka to win her first Slam title.
“The trophy had to go under the plane,” said Keys CNN SportDon Riddell. “It’s a little too big to go to air bins and there were not enough seats to put it on the plane with us, but that did it in one room.
“I’m happy to have my eyes again!”
To say that the success of Keys in Australia had long been to come would be an understatement.
Since the tour broke just after being 14 years old, Keys was presented as one of the main hopes of the United States to win a Grand Slam title.
She reached a career summit of the world n ° 7 in 2016 and it was at this time that Keys seemed most likely to go to the end in one of the four slams. There was an appearance in the open semi-finals in Australia in 2015, a heartbreaking final defeat at his American home in 2017 and the French and American semi-finals in 2018.
It was then, however, that the deep races of Grand Slam have dried for the keys. Between the 2018 US Open and the 2022 Australian Open, she had only one quarter -final and people began to wonder if her best chance of winning had already come and disappeared.
Keys, who has now equaled his best career classification of the world n ° 7, frankly admits that these doubts also crossed his mind.
“I think I also thought that I should have won one now, and I think it slowly was starting to become a bit of a mental block for me and a burden,” she said.
“Finally freeing me from this burden, I was finally able to win one. It was not as long as it didn’t matter less or I didn’t want it anymore, but I think I was finally able to separate my esteem from me to win and lose tennis matches.
“I think that before being wrapped in the fact that it was really a little debilitating, especially in the great moments and the major tournaments that were counting. So I think that being able to separate this and be proud of my career and what I have done so far, gave me the freedom to go and be able to win a slam. »»
Now, about three weeks before his 30th birthday, Keys has become the fourth older woman to win her first Grand Slam title in the open era.
His Australian open glory crowned a whirlwind of a few months for Keys, who also recently married his partner and coach, Bjorn Fratangelo.
Keys jokes saying that marriage is always “definitively at the top of the ranking” as his favorite experience, before winning the Australian Open, calling the big day “really the best weekend in my life”.
She added: “But being able to win a big slam and sharing this experience with my husband is probably a very close second. He also played professionally for a very long time, so the first six years of our relationship, we could not see each other much.
“So it is definitely a huge advantage that we can really spend time together and be able to really be a team and work together was so fun.
“And now, to make one of the highest honors of our sport and that we can do it together, I mean, it is not something that most married couples have to do.”
Keys gave the impression that living constantly, training and traveling with her husband is still navigating, but she admitted that this was not the case.
“I really think that the worst is to have to admit that he is right, uh, most of the time,” she joked.
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