The former Argentine tennis player, Juan Martín del Potro, confessed that not competing in tennis professionally generates a state of suffering: “I cannot psychologically accept a life without tennis.” In this sense, the winner of the US Open 2009 detailed: “Today I can only walk, I do not run even on the treadmill and I am unable to climb the stairs without pain. I can’t even drive long without having to stop to stretch my legs because of the pain,” in an interview with La Nación.La Torre de Tandil suffered the first fracture in the kneecap of his right knee in late 2018, when he was third in the ATP rankings. A year later he returned to the circuit but a similar injury took him away from the courts again until 2022 when he retired at the ATP in Buenos Aires.During these years, he had to undergo three operations on the affected knee, although he could never recover 100%: “This is my reality. It’s very hard, very sad, but I’m still looking for ways to improve. My new challenge is how to try to process everything, assimilate what touches me and how I get up every day to live as well as possible,” he said.
Faced with this difficult situation, he added: “When I talk to other athletes who are no longer active they tell me: ‘Well, I took the last two years of my career, the last year, I prepared in this way or another.’ But I’m doing it now, I was number 3 in the world until I suddenly broke my knees and here I am, with nothing.” I recently went to Switzerland to see another doctor and started a new treatment recommended by several professional tennis players, but so far I have not had a single positive result,” he revealed. Finally, he lamented because “that feeling is very hard after every attempt, whether it’s a treatment or a surgery. The frustration I can feel when things don’t work out is hard to explain. I deceive myself, I have faith in every new treatment I try, but every time this failure is a very hard blow,” he concluded.
