Alison Van Uytvanck on life after tennis and Grand Slam anxiety: ‘Now I can breathe a bit more’
“I had a lot of anxiety attacks. I couldn’t sleep for days before.
“When you’re playing in a big arena it’s from the moment you wake up — you just wish to fast-forward time and be done.”
Playing big matches on the biggest stages in tennis is what players dream of, but for Alison Van Uytvanck, the experience often felt like a nightmare.
A skilful player with an all-court game who was most successful on the natural surfaces, Van Uytvanck retired from tennis in August, aged 30. She won five WTA-level titles, was ranked as high as No. 37, and reached the French Open quarterfinals aged 21 in 2015. She reached the Wimbledon fourth round a few years later, knocking out defending champion Garbine Muguruza along the way.
Injuries were a factor in her quitting the sport, especially a nagging back issue, but really Van Uytvanck was exhausted with the demands of being a professional tennis player. Where important matches and big moments can inspire and energize players, they left Van Uytvanck stricken by fear and paralysis, leaving her in a vicious cycle. She knew she had to go through hard matches to get used to the pressure, but every time they arrived doubts and fears would resurface.
This is one of those intangibles that can make or break careers, or, in Van Uytvanck’s case, be the difference between a top-40 and a top-20 one.
“This is the first time I’m speaking about it,” Van Uytvanck said in a recent video interview from her home in Belgium, which she represented at the 2021 Olympics.
“Mentally I was not able to continue in the state I was. Now things are more calm for me. I can breathe a bit more.”
With her ability to slice and volley and her willingness to vary spin and speed from the baseline, Van Uytvanck tended to thrive on clay and grass, which reward the kind of feel she had for tennis. As recently as June 2024, Van Uytvanck won a Challenger title on grass in Surbiton, south-west London, which left her feeling good going into Wimbledon. After struggling with her back injury for a couple of years, she thought she was finally turning a corner. The poor performance that followed in a first-round defeat at Wimbledon to Yuliia Starodubtseva was a “huge shock” and after a couple of early exits at subsequent clay-court events, Van Uytvanck was done, ending her career with a win percentage of 59 percent (386-269 from 655 matches).
She realised her time was up when she started looking at her watch during training wanting it to be over.
“To travel the world alone, leaving my family and my wife all behind… It was kind of tough and I decided if it’s like this I don’t actually want to do that,” Van Uytvanck says. She’s now back in Belgium with her wife, physio Emilie Vermeiren, and is weighing up what comes next.
Van Uytvanck’s descriptions of tour life will resonate with many players. Being introverted isn’t always conducive to a profession whose pinnacle requires performing in front of tens of thousands of people (plus millions watching on television) for weeks at a time if things go well.
Over the last couple of months, high-profile players have been open about managing anxiety on the biggest stages. At the U.S. Open in September, Britain’s Jack Draper vomited multiple times on court during his semifinal defeat to Jannik Sinner, and said afterwards that: “I’m quite an anxious human being — sometimes I do feel a bit sick when it gets tough.” Two weeks ago, the world No. 9, Grigor Dimitrov, said in a news conference that he had suffered from panic attacks during his career.
“It helps when you can talk to people, even if it’s another tennis player. We should be more open to each other.”
Naomi Osaka is another high-profile player who has been open about the mental health challenges she has faced on the tour, and the fact that they’ve forced her to take extended breaks, as is Coco Gauff, and many others, in a sport that can brutally erode a player’s sense of self-worth.
“Having a run at a Grand Slam, having 10,000 people watching, that was tough for me,” Van Uytvanck says.
“If you play a Roland-Garros quarterfinal aged 21 you don’t know what’s going to happen to you. And after that, a lot of things came into my direction. I was not made for that.
“You have to overcome your fears. And a lot of negative talk. I didn’t do a bad job in that way, but this could have been better.”
Van Uytvanck, who remains grateful for the independence tennis gave her at a young age, started working with a sports psychologist during her career. It helped, but did not and could never take away the basic fact of her struggle: You have to do the job. In retirement she “would like to teach younger players how to handle these precious moments,” while acknowledging that doing so is easier for some than others.
Van Uytvanck also believes that tennis authorities need to take further responsibility for players’ welfare, while praising the WTA’s provision of psychological support that helped during her career. She’s not a fan of the increasingly common and two-week WTA 1000 tournaments, and would like to see a merger between the ATP and WTA to simplify the logistics of being on tour, with so many different events taking place at the same time. Talks are ongoing about a possible commercial merger between the two bodies, which would initially see an 80-20 revenue split between the men’s and women’s tours.
A moment from her career that Van Uytvanck looks back on fondly came at Wimbledon 2018. After defeating Anett Kontaveit 6-2, 6-3 to reach the fourth round in the singles tournament, Van Uytvanck ran to the side of the court and shared a kiss with Greet Minnen, a fellow player and Van Uytvanck’s then-girlfriend, on what happened to be the same day as the Pride in London parade, the annual LGBTQ+ celebration. The following year the pair played together in the Wimbledon doubles, and had to face each other twice on the WTA Tour before breaking up in 2021.
Van Uytvanck has always been frank about life as an out tennis player. “I’m gay — I don’t have a disease,” she said in a news conference at the 2018 tournament, soon after giving an interview on Belgian television where she first revealed she was gay. The Wimbledon kiss with Minnen was a hugely celebrated moment, and one Van Uytvanck looks back on fondly.
She maintains that she has not experienced any homophobia in the locker room, and admits to being perplexed at the lack of an openly gay active male player in living memory. Brian Vahaly, the American former world No. 63, who came out after retiring in 2007, told this reporter in 2018 that: “I heard homophobic comments all the time in the locker room — to my face, behind my back. That was just a part of the culture”.
“It is kind of surprising,” Van Uytvanck says. “If only one player, like a top 100 player, would be open about it, it would be easier for other ones to open up.”
The LGBTQ+ community has generally been more accepted on the WTA Tour compared to its male counterpart, partly thanks to trailblazers like Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova. Van Uytvanck was in a rarer position during her career, dating a fellow player for five years.
Van Uytvanck loved training with Minnen in their native Belgium and becoming the first couple to play doubles together at Wimbledon in 2019 was a “dream come true”. But there were challenges too. “There are some disadvantages that everything is a competition,” Van Uytvanck said as part of ’s report in September about the realities of being a tennis couple. “Even without tennis. Let’s say you’re doing something physically, then it’s like, ‘I want to do better than you’. We were always talking about tennis, tennis, tennis, and there was nothing else. That was something not as nice, I would say.”
Another thing “not as nice” was having to play against each other, which happened twice — first in July 2019 at the Liqui Moly Open in Karlsruhe, Germany, a few weeks after they’d played doubles together at Wimbledon. Van Uytvanck won, as she did when they played again at an ITF event in Nottingham, England, a couple of years later.
“It wasn’t fun,” Van Uytvanck said. “We knew exactly how the other one was going to play, and it was tough to just focus on yourself.”
Van Uytvanck and Minnen, who remain on good terms, broke up a few months after that second meeting. But they still kept running into one another at tournaments. “At the beginning, it was a bit weird,” Van Uytvanck said.
“And then we were just like, ‘Hi. How are you doing?’. Some small talk.”
The pair are both with other partners now but still share a dog back in Belgium.
The WTA Tour Finals is currently playing out in Saudi Arabia, where same-sex relationships are criminalized and women’s rights are limited. Daria Kasatkina, another openly gay player, has entered the field for the final round-robin matches as an alternate for the injured Jessica Pegula. Kasatkina expressed wariness about the prospect of tournaments being hosted in the kingdom in 2023, but has since said that she has received assurances about player safety.
Van Uytvanck says she thinks she would have played, but focuses on the impact of expecting openly gay players to shoulder the whole burden of such an important topic. “Andy Murray said (in 2020) that he would fully support it if there was a gay male tennis player,” Van Uytvanck says.
“We need to hear more of that on social media and in the press. Then I think it would be easier.”
She adds, as WTA chief executive Portia Archer referenced in a news conference before the tournament, that WTA tournaments have been held in countries with the same laws for over a decade. “It was always fun to go there,” she says of events in Qatar and Dubai.
“You just needed to be a bit more careful when you went out of the building.”
There certainly could have been no on-court kiss like at Wimbledon.
The fears and anxieties that hung over Van Uytvanck’s career coalesced into the waking nightmare she most dreaded at the Australian Open eight years ago.
The double bagel, a 6-0, 6-0 defeat, is a humiliation that few sports can compete with given the individual nature of tennis, and the fact that the score is communicating that you could not have performed any worse. Football teams can always concede more goals, baseball teams more runs, NFL teams more touchdowns. 6-0, 6-0 is the most damning score women’s tennis can produce.
It’s awful at the best of times, but for Van Uytvanck it happened on one of the biggest stages — the nearly 15,000-capacity Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne. In the first round of the 2016 Australian Open first round in 2016, Van Uytvanck suffered the ignominy of a double bagel against two-time champion Victoria Azarenka in just 53 minutes.
“It was torture,” Van Uytvanck says, living through precisely the kind of situation that gave her sleepless nights at Grand Slams.
“You’re thinking about all of these things. ‘What if it’s going too fast? What if I cannot make one point? What are people going to say? These people bought tickets for this…’ You get crazy.
“You hope it’s one or two games and then it gets better. But with Azarenka, I couldn’t let go. You’re just pushing the ball; you’re not playing. It’s torture. It’s torture on court. You just want to get off as quickly as possible. It was very painful.”
Defeats like that become more painful because of the inevitable social media abuse tennis players receive after every loss — tight or resounding — which has only intensified in recent years because of the prevalence of sports betting, with people angry at losing money subjecting players to tirades of threats and anger. In August, Caroline Garcia on X shared some of the horrific recent abuse she had received, including suggestions that she should end her life.
Van Uytvanck knows social media is necessary for things like attracting sponsorships, but she’s clear in how much of a negative she finds it. Being openly gay made Van Uytvanck even more of a target for social media abuse. “It’s a lot of negative s*** talk,” she says. Aware of how lucky she was to do the thing she loves for a living, earning millions of dollars in prize money in the process, she is also open about the impact of being abused for your appearance and sexuality after every defeat, and how it fed into the anxiety she already felt about being embarrassed on some of the world’s biggest stages.
Garcia has only played one tournament since opening up about the abuse she was getting and is now having a break until 2025. In language that sounds remarkably like Van Uytvanck’s, Garcia said on X in September that: “Mentally, I need a reset. I need to step away from the constant grind of tennis. I’m exhausted from the anxiety, the panic attacks, the tears before matches.
“I’m tired of living in a world where my worth is measured by last week’s results, my ranking or my unforced errors.”
These metrics have defined Van Uytvanck for pretty much her entire life, and now she’s ready for a change.
“I don’t want to be remembered just as a tennis player,” she says.
“The thing that I do or did doesn’t change who I am. It just helped me reach my goals and my dreams. But, for now, I’m just happy to be a person.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennis, Women's Tennis
2024 The Athletic Media Company
