A dominant win in the last warm-up tournament before a Grand Slam doesn’t sound like an occasion for an Olympic gold medalist to express disbelief. But in Adelaide, after a 6-2, 1-0 (ret.) victory over world No. 14 Anna Kalinskaya, Belinda Bencic is at a loss.
“I didn’t even think I’d be here,” Bencic, 27 and the world No. 421, said in her on-court interview.
Bencic isn’t returning from a long injury. She’s done that already, recovering from wrist surgery and a five-month layoff in 2017 to rise from the 300s to a high of world No. 4 and then that Olympic gold in Tokyo in 2021, where she beat Marketa Vondrousova in the final. She’s doing what so many women do outside of tennis, but has until recently been a rarity in the upper echelons of the sport: coming back from a career break during which she gave birth to her first child, Bella in April 2024.
She may not have believed the speed of her return to form, but she has no doubts about where she can go now.
“I’m really confident about getting back to where I was and even better,” she said in a recent interview via Zoom from Slovakia, where both her parents are from.
“I felt really inspired and brave enough to have a baby mid-career because a lot of other athletes and tennis players have done it before. It’s…
