MADRID: Spain’s former world number one and Wimbledon and French Open champion Garbine Muguruza announced her retirement at a news conference on Saturday, making the extended break she had announced a year ago a permanent step.

Venezuelan-born Muguruza won the French Open in 2016 and Wimbledon in 2017, and she reached the final of the Australian Open in 2020. Last April she said she would take a break from competition to spend more time with her family.

“I didn’t miss the discipline and the difficulty of the life I had before. I have been realising that what I most want to look forward to is my next chapter and not the tennis chapter,” she told a news conference at the Laureus Awards in Madrid.

“The time has come to say goodbye, it has been a long and beautiful career, but I feel the time has come to retire. It’s a decision that I’ve been taking little by little.”

Muguruza, 30, was ranked number one in 2017 and was ranked as high as third by the end of 2021 when she won three WTA titles.

Published in Dawn, April 21st, 2024