Jarry: “It has been the most difficult year of my life, but it gave me growth and motivation for what’s next” | ATP Tour

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Jarry: “It has been the most difficult year of my life, but it gave me growth and motivation”

The Chilean reviews his plausible season, the medical problems and the mentality to continue growing despite the difficulties

November 06, 2024

Nicolás Jarry is a tennis player who lives each of his matches on the ATP Tour with intensity. Off the courts, he is a person who has learned to enjoy everyday life, the challenges that come with the weekly grind of going from tournament to tournament, always attached to his family, his greatest balm to get through the arduous moments and with those who are also the most enjoy the joys.

Thus, the Chilean, current No. 37 in the PIF ATP Rankings, lowered the curtain on his year and after several weeks away from home he is back in Santiago, ready to rest and motivated to return to training. “It’s very nice to be home after two months… and after the busy year I’ve had, but I really want to rest and also train: to recharge as much as possible for the preseason and then for next year,” he says without a doubt. hesitation and calmness in conversation with ATPTour.com

The “busy” year label that Jarry chose to define his 2024 has several edges, with notable results such as the finals in Buenos Aires, including a victory against Carlos Alcaraz, or his first ATP Masters 1000 definition in Rome, but with a second semester full of setbacks and with a complex medical issue that I did not expect to have to face. “The year was a mix of emotions. It was a very difficult second semester mentally, but I also grew like no other… I think it has been the most difficult year of my life,” he said.

“It has been much harder for me than 2020 with the suspension, although that was much more dramatic, but in general this was more difficult from the first week of the year: it did not start very well with my son with COVID, having to carry him to the clinic in Australia. After losing a very hard-fought match there, and then having to deal with tennis things and different pressures,” says the Chilean.

“The second half of the year came the injury to the vestibular system. But also a lot of teaching, learning, improvement, and, as difficult as it has been, I managed to find peace of mind to appreciate tennis all my life,” Jarry describes almost without pause.

In fact, such was the severity of his medical issue that the former world No. 16 even thought he should stop playing: “I think I could easily have stayed without playing tennis for the rest of my life, and that’s why I was dealing with many sensations.” Weeks before his participation in Wimbledon, the Chilean revealed that he suffered from vestibular neuronitis, a disorder characterized by a sudden and intense vertigo attack, caused by inflammation of the vestibular nerve, the branch of the 8th cranial nerve that helps control balance.

How has Jarry experienced it? Accepting it with great height, humility and without taking a step back. “It is a very different injury from all… when you have shoulder pain, you have shoulder pain and you can’t serve and you can’t compete and you don’t go on the court and that’s it. In my case, I had to be patient and I had to continue living my normal life, but in a totally different way.”

“But I have learned a lot and I am very happy with everything I have achieved off the field. All the growth I had gives me a lot of motivation for next year and even more so knowing that I think this was my second best year of my life as a tennis player, in terms of ranking and I practically played only one semester,” he says, hopefully. “That’s why it gives me new confidence and gives me great motivation to dream,” he predicted.

A perfectionist to the extreme, and also self-demanding of himself, Jarry defines his ability to accept what was happening to him as his greatest capacity in recent times: “I had to lower my demands four thousand revolutions. Because if not, I couldn’t… I was going to go into depression and it would have been much worse… and now I can say that I ended the year happy, that it was a goal, calm, enjoying life, my profession and my family.”

“No one knows how it will continue, every day I am improving and I think it could be something more normal for me, to have good vision, to be able to follow the ball and read it, what ball is coming, at what speed, etc., etc.,” he defined. . “In the end, I had the year I had, with four results and it is my second best year of my life,” he closed with a smile.

“Luckily I had my family who has helped me a lot. I don’t think I would have had a very good time with all this, traveling alone… laughing a lot with my children, with my wife, has allowed me to escape the overdemand of tennis,” said Jarry, one of the few players to travel full-time around the circuit, with two sons, Juanito and Santiago, already two characters in any player’s room, just as his grandfather Jaime Fillol did with his wife Mindy Haggstrom, traveling with the then little Cecilia (Nicolás’s mother) in the 70’s.

How, then, does Jarry face 2025? “These last two months I knew it wasn’t going to be good. But despite everything, I feel that I am playing well, I know, I still have a long way to go but I have a lot of faith that when I manage to achieve this, I will have taken many steps forward in things that were extra to the tennis results because now “I am very aware of the mental strength I have to get out of bad situations.”

Jarry thus closes a year with the desire to rest and with the preseason that will begin with four weeks from November 18 under the command of César Fabregas, in Barcelona and closing a positive stage with Juan Ignacio Chela. “I learned a lot from him and I am very grateful to him,” he said of the Argentine. More strengthened, the Chilean, who will confirm a second coach shortly, is resting and looking forward to starting again, in his first tournament of next season, in Brisbane.