Sevastova wasn’t sure she’d walk unaided again. She was wrong

ROME — Of all the things Anastasija Sevastova imagined about motherhood, learning to walk at the same time as her baby daughter was not something she saw coming.

But just over a year ago, that’s exactly what she had to do. Only four tournaments into her return from maternity leave, Sevastova suffered a severe knee injury in the Austin quarterfinals, damaging not just her ACL but the meniscus and cartilage. She was on crutches for six weeks — just as Alexandra was learning to walk.

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“That was not fun,” Sevastova said ahead of the Internazionali BNL d’Italia, where she is competing with a special ranking and where she will play Lucia Bronzetti in the first round on Tuesday. “But it helps when you have another life. And then I started walking with her!”

After Sevastova’s comeback was abruptly cut short, few expected to see her back on tour — let alone to re-emerge with the splash she made at the Mutua Madrid Open. In her opening match, Sevastova, 35, overcame a 0-8 head-to-head to defeat Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova for the first time, then ended Stuttgart champion Jelena Ostapenko’s hot streak in straight sets to make the third round. Her signature drop shots and slices were as good as ever.

“Nobody beats me nine times!” she said jokingly about the Pavlyuchenkova match. “When I got to 3-3, I was like, ‘I won three games. That’s good enough.’ And then I relaxed and didn’t think too much. It was a process.”

That’s also the mindset that carried Sevastova through her devastating injury. “Pregnancy, giving birth — nothing compared to it,” Sevastova said. Whether or not she would come back to tennis was far from her mind. At first, her only goal at first was to walk unaided again.

“When you’re on crutches you don’t think about playing tennis,” she said. “Step by step. After six months I could maybe stay on court for an hour once a week. It’s another step and another. I wanted to start practicing because I could see the progress, but in November, December, it was getting worse again.

“I would practice and for the next four days my knee was swollen and painful. I tried with some injections, but they didn’t help. In January I had another surgery, and it helped a lot. From that point on I saw myself coming back.”

Typically deadpan, Sevastova can now shrug off her injury.

“I cannot complain,” she said. “There are things that are worse that happen to other people. I was injured for a year — that happened to me. You cannot explain why it happened. But now I’m healthy, I have a healthy family, healthy daughter.”

Sevastova’s special ranking allocation has been reset, and she plans to skip Roland Garros in order to use her two Grand Slam slots at Wimbledon and the US Open. The latter was the site of her greatest major success, with one semifinal and two quarterfinal showings between 2016 and 2018. Now she says her run in Madrid last month is the result she’s most proud of in her career. She jokes this means she’s at the peak of her career.

But in light of her contentment off court, what was the motivation for coming back at all? Sevastova has what she calls a “beautiful life” in Graz, Austria with partner and coach Ronnie Schmidt, 2-year-old Alexandra and Portuguese water dog Oscar (who, ironically, dislikes swimming). Alexandra has even shown an interest in tennis — albeit only for five minutes at a time, before being distracted by water, sand or the trampoline.

“I just want to prove it to myself,” Sevastova said. “I want to show my daughter this life and show her you can achieve some things when you’re persistent. It’s important for her to see it. You can say, ‘I want to win this, this and this,’ but that’s my goal.”