«I am happy for my victory, but I can’t be happy at all. The situation of the world does not allow me to do so. I feel like…”, and Our Jabeur broke down to cry. It happened at the 2023 WTA Finals, just a few days after the start of the current war conflict in Gaza, when the Tunisian announced that she was donating her prizes “to the Palestinians.” At that time Jabeur was sixth in the WTA ranking and had just been a finalist at Wimbledon; Just after that, he spent half a year without winning two victories until he fell to his current position of 39th on the world list. Early this Tuesday morning she debuts in the Australian Open against the Ukrainian Anhelina Kalinina in search of recovering his tennis and overcoming a gaming crisis that seems insurmountable. Because? Because the war continues.
«What is happening in the world has affected me more than I expected. I try to stay away from the media because every time I see a video it’s horrible, it’s horrible,” she confessed already in Melbourne in an interview with The Guardian where she added: “I’m trying to separate things, although it’s very difficult to do so. “What’s the point of playing tennis if innocent people die in Gaza and Ukraine?”
The rise to stardom
Jabeur won junior Roland Garros in 2011 and entered the WTA Top 100 in 2017, but she introduced herself to the general public in 2022 with an astonishing streak. With an unorthodox, creative, different game, he won the Mutua Madrid Open and reached the finals of Rome, Wimbledon and the US Open. She was the first African to achieve such achievements, which is why she immediately became an idol for many. In those months, especially with the goodbye of Serena Williams Jabeur was the most sought-after tennis player, both for the media and for fans, who stopped her to take selfies and more selfies at the end of each training session.
Pushed into tennis by her mother, Ridawho saw sport as the best way to progress, initially lacked funding for his training and travel, but in recent years several companies from Muslim countries, such as Qatar Airways or the Saudi Kayanee, have dedicated themselves to his career. Today she continues to be a reference, recently named ambassador of the World Food Program (WFP), but the results are very different.
A perfect plan broken
«I try to remind myself why I started playing tennis. The field should be my happy place and, if it isn’t, then something is probably really wrong,” Jabeur said these days, accepting that there have been other problems beyond the bombings in Gaza. Last year he suffered discomfort in his knee and shoulder, but he did not want to stop and that ended up translating into defeats. Furthermore, the misfortune in the 2023 Wimbledon final was and remains a disaster.
After her emergence in 2022, the Tunisian proposed that title match against the Czech Marketa Vondrousova on the center court of the All England Club as the peak of his career and that did not end well. Jabeur even declared that if she won she would retire for a season to be a mother, she confessed that she had already talked about it with her partner, the former Tunisian fencer. Karim Kamounand the 6-4, 6-4 defeat broke all their plans.
«It was very difficult because I connected the game with being a mother and building a family. “That approach added an extra sadness to the defeat,” he admitted months later, when he assured that he would continue playing without breaks until he won a Grand Slam. Then came the conflict in Gaza and an unstoppable wave of defeats. «How can we live in a world like this? What is happening? To me, nothing makes sense. “Everything is really horrible,” he proclaimed.