Racquets down: Even in retirement, Ashleigh Barty remains an outlier-Sports News , Firstpost

Ashleigh Barty’s 2022 Australian Open finished with a glug of beer, a trophy in hand and smile on her face. She’s not someone you’d think of as rocking the boat.

But the easy-going Barty scripted her own silent rebellion in the game. She was an Australian in a sport dominated by Europeans and Americans, a poet in an era of power-hitters, a dreamer among blinkered workhorses and a 5’5 ace machine. In a deeply competitive, quick-changing landscape of women’s tennis, she held on to the No 1 spot for 121 weeks. She even retired on her own terms.

At a time when sports science has extended the careers of athletes the world over, when tennis players are playing well into their 30s, when Roger Federer and Serena Williams are contemplating comebacks at 40, Barty, a month shy of her 26^th birthday, is done. On Wednesday, when she announced that she is quitting the game, Barty said she had very little to give physically and mentally.

“I don’t have the physical drive, the emotional want and everything it takes to challenge yourself at the very top of the level anymore,” she told her former doubles partner and friend Casey Dellacqua in an interview. “I am spent.”

In a way, the timing of her retirement is what most sportspersons dream of, but very few succeed. Barty quit when she is literally at the top of the game. She’s ranked No 1 in the world and has won 25 of her last 26 matches. Her latest triumph came at the Australian Open, when she became the country’s first home-grown women’s champion in 44 years. During that fortnight, Barty effortless dominance saw her win 14 out of 14 sets.

Just when she had established herself as the biggest drawcard in women’s tennis, Barty has decided to draw the curtains. She is only the second women’s player, apart from Justine Henin in 2008, to retire when ranked No 1 in the world.

Barty’s decision comes as a surprise, a shock even, but it seems almost entirely in keeping with the unconventional arc of her career.

A talented teenager, Barty made her WTA Tour debut ten years ago. While she did well in doubles, with Dellacqua, she struggled with the demands of the sport in singles. After the 2014 US Open, at the age of 18, she decided to take a break from tennis.

“It was too much too quickly for me as I’ve been travelling from quite a young age,” she told cricket.com.au. “”I wanted to experience life as a normal teenaged girl and have some normal experiences.”

Instead, she tried her hand at cricket and blossomed in a team environment. The hand-eye co-ordination, ingrained due to tennis, meant she quickly impressed her coaches in cricket. Barty played for Brisbane Heat in the inaugural season of the Women’s Big Bash League in 2015.

She returned to tennis, in 2017, with a sharper focus and renewed hunger. Textured with slices and angles and subtle pace-shifts, Barty’s game is a throwback to the great Australian talents of the 1960s and 1970s. At 20, she developed an understanding of how to use those skills to tease open, as she would be unable to overpower, her opponent’s defenses. She brought a whole new outlook to women’s tennis, which remains a bastion of the baseliners.

Starved of variety from the rest of the field, Barty’s rivals often struggled to work her out. She looks innocuous, as does her game. But at 5’5, she places the serve better than most of her peers. In 2021, she fired 325 aces in 49 matches, more aces per match than any of the season-ending top 10 players. In 2022, in the 11 matches she has played so far, Barty has served 77 aces. Her serve is a great launching pad, from where she can explore the length and breadth of the court and dictate the course of the rally. She uses the backhand slice, which looked more menacing than ever before at the Australian Open, regularly and brilliantly to cut her rivals down to size.

Since her return in 2017, to her retirement, the Australian has a 188-56 record at Tour-level events with a winning percentage of 77. Only 23-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams has done better in the last five years, winning 79 of her 101 matches (78.2 per cent). She finishes her career with 15 singles and 12 doubles titles.

An all-court player, Barty also achieved the rare feat of winning a major on all three surfaces. Her first Grand Slam title came at the 2019 French Open and she followed it up with the 2021 Wimbledon triumph and a win at her home Slam earlier this year. After her win in Melbourne, many agreed that she was the best, and classiest player, in women’s tennis currently. Great things were predicted for this effervescent talent.

But Barty, on Tuesday, revealed that she had started to feel the dip in energy since her Wimbledon win.

“Wimbledon last year changed a lot for me as a person and for me as an athlete,” she said. “When you work so hard your whole life for one goal. To be able to win Wimbledon, which was my dream, the one true dream that I wanted in tennis, that really changed my perspective.”

It started feeling like the beginning of the end. She said this feels “different” to her previous hiatus. “I’m so grateful to everything that tennis has given me,” the 25-year-old added. “But I know that the time is right now for me to step away and chase other dreams and to, yeah, put the racquets down.”

Over the years, Barty’s tennis savvy and versatility have kept her rivals guessing. Her retirement is like a perfectly timed backhand drop shot that no one saw coming. Not a hurried or desperate attempt, but well thought out, expertly crafted stroke that ends with a bit of magic.

Not many could make sense of her meteoric rise after the sabbatical; few can make sense of her early retirement.

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