Laura Siegemund is back – and will start next week at the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix as defending champion. That she had a lot of bad luck with the cruciate ligament rupture shortly afterwards last year has long since been processed.
She was in the shape of her life: Siegemund had defeated three top ten players in her Stuttgart run alone, in the entire clay court season even five – before she knocked out a bitter cruciate ligament rupture on her right knee in Nuremberg. They even had some of them on paper for a run in Roland Garros, and especially in retrospect, after Paris became a major surprise, with the completely unexpected winner Yelena Ostapenko…
“I’m not on the hypothetical trip,” Siegemund himself told the New York Times. “I saw that as a task I had to take on, and that helped me deal with it positively.”
While Siegemund was only able to pick up her winner Porsche from last year, which was painted according to her wishes, late due to injury (she could not bend her knee enough to get in at first), she is currently struggling with something else: the knee support, which she still wears for physical and mental reasons. “I want to take them off… she’s really ugly,” says the 30-year-old. “In this sense, an appeal to all people who make bandages: Maybe there’s a nicer thing to do?”
Siegemund celebrates her return to the Porsche Arena next week with good comeback results: two victories at the ITF tournament in Santa Margherita di Pula, one in Charleston, as she lost to Naomi Osaka only after a hard fight. This was followed, however, by a task in Lugano due to problems on the left leg. Keep your fingers crossed that Siegemund will be fully fit again until her performance in Stuttgart!