The Swiss Patty Schnyder has said goodbye to professional tennis with the 2018 season.
The 39-year-old announced her decision as “no big deal” – but for tennis aesthetes and long-time fans it will be one thing: Patty Schnyder, the world’s number 7 in 2005, has apparently stopped playing Tour tennis. “On November 21 at exactly 3:20:23 p.m., my last tournament ball was on the way. It was a match ball,” twittered Schnyder.
Schnyder looks back on an eventful career. In 1994 she became a professional, in 1998 she reached her first Grand Slam quarter finals at the French Open and US Open and played her way up to 11th place in the world under coach Eric van Harpen. In 2004 she achieved her best major result with the semi-final at the Australian Open. In 2011 she left the tennis stage for the first time.
Schnyder had made the first headlines as a 20-year-old through her liaison with the German miracle healer Rainer Harnecker, who wanted to lead her to the top with a bizarre orange juice cure (she allegedly drank four to five litres a day). A private detective named Rainer Hofmann convicted Harnecker as an impostor after he wanted to cure cancer patients with his orange juice therapy and a needle roller. Schnyder finally married Rainer Hofmann. This was followed by a break in contact with her parents, tax proceedings, foreclosure auctions and a legal dispute with the Swiss publisher Ringier-Verlag. In 2013 Hofmann finally separated from Hofmann, who tried his luck in the horse business (and again got into trouble with the police).
The last thing to calm down was Schnyder, who returned to tennis and started her comeback in 2015, shortly after the birth of daughter Kim Ayla. Schnyder once again made it into the top 150 this year, survived the qualification at the US Open and offered Maria Sharapova a great resistance at 2:6, 6:7 (6), especially in the second set.
Schnyder won eleven titles on the WTA Tour, now she wants to “try something new”.