Wimbledon 2021 – Ash Barty felt completely at home when she won Wimbledon

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Ash Party made her intentions clear before the start of Wimbledon.

“One day, I’d like to be a champ here,” Barty said late last month, three days before her first-round match. “It’s a dream. It’s a goal.”

Barty was a lifelong student of the game, fascinated by the traditions and history of the event since childhood. Since she first picked up a racket, winning the title was what she wanted most, and gave her the opportunity to try to achieve it on the 50th anniversary of fellow Indigenous Australian Yvonne Golagong Cowley, which made her even more special.

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In the final at the All England Club against Karolina Pliskova, everything came together.

25-year-old Barty has put in an incredible effort from the moment she took up court. She won the first 14 points of the game, and 16 of the first 18 jumped to lead 4-0. It took more than eight minutes for Pliskova to win a point. Pliskova eventually found her level and Barty had to fight harder, but she eventually won her second major title after winning 6-3, 6-7 (4), 6-3 in just under two hours.

The achievement became even more remarkable, coming on the 50th anniversary of Gulagong Kawley’s first title at Wimbledon. For the two weeks, Barty wore a scalloped collar skirt in honor of Jelagong Kawli, whom she considers a teacher, and she wanted to carry on her legacy.

“It took me so long to express the fact that I wanted to dare to dream and say I wanted to win this amazing tournament,” Barty said on court after the match. “Being able to live my dream now with everyone here made it better than I could have imagined. I didn’t sleep much last night, I was thinking what if, but when I was walking out this court I somehow felt at home.”

Saturday’s result, of course, came as no surprise to anyone who watched her win the Wimbledon girls’ title 10 years ago. But Barty’s career has only been a straight line since then.

After a great rookie career, expectations were high once I became a professional but life on the tour was not what I expected. Although she reached three major doubles finals before her 18th birthday, she missed her family and home during the week-to-week travel trip.

Burnt out and looking for a change, the 18-year-old headed home after the 2014 US Open, swapping her bat for a cricket bat. I took an 18-month break from tennis and played in a professional cricket league in Australia.

Eventually, her love for tennis returned. She started with Craig Tyzzer, who remained her coach, then returned in 2016, playing exclusively at ITF events in Australia before turning her sights to turf and her favorite Grand Slam. She reached the quarter-finals (where she faced Pliskova) in her first WTA event in nearly two years in Nottingham, then lost in the second round of qualifying to Wimbledon. She played in only one tournament that year, but the spark returned.

She won her first Malaysian Open title in March 2017, and played in two other finals that year. Her ranking rose and she topped the top 20 by the end of the year. But her confidence still needs time.

“It’s something I’ve worked on over the years and we’ve identified it,” Tyzzer said Friday. “There have been times when she has just questioned herself… She handles these things much better.

“It’s a continuous thing. It’s like hitting a forehand and a backhand, you keep working on it, you keep building. It’s getting better and better at these things all the time.”

Barty said being able to play at Wimbledon was “nothing short of a miracle”. Peter Nichols / Getty Images

Tyzzer said Barty wasn’t ready to publicly announce her dream of winning Wimbledon in the early years of her comeback, even after her first major French Open title in 2019. But now she’s ready to publicize her dream there, knowing it could fail.

In her previous four draw matches, she had never made it past the fourth round, but the cancellation of the 2020 tournament due to the coronavirus pandemic reminded her of how much she loves the event.

Despite having to retire during her second round match at the French Open last month with a thigh injury – something she called “heartbreaking” at the time and said Saturday is usually a two-month recovery process – she is not able. Playing in any of the groundbreaking events on grass, Barty was determined to compete at Wimbledon. Her team tried to shield her from the details of her injury to keep her focused.

“Being able to play here at Wimbledon was nothing short of a miracle,” Barty said. “I guess they didn’t tell me [the likelihood of being able to play] We just proved that we can face the odds. I think now, to play without pain during this event was amazing. It’s funny, sometimes the stars line up, you can think positive, you can plan, and sometimes the stars get along. You can chase your dreams.”

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Ash Party celebrates after winning her second Grand Slam and her first Wimbledon title.

Barty’s early dominance was threatened in the second set of Saturday’s final. Pliskova broke Barty in the 12th game of the hotly contested set to force her to break a tie and then a playoff, the first in the women’s final at Wimbledon since 2012. But Barty left nothing to chance at that point, going into his first three matches and wrapping up the match on serve.

When it was over, she crouched and put her head in her hands amidst a star-studded crowd, including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova and Tom Cruise, who showered her with a standing ovation.

Normally, Barty couldn’t hide her feelings when she climbed into the players chest to embrace her team. When she returned to court for the court ceremony, she became the fourth Australian woman to lift the trophy at Wimbledon, and the first since Gulagong Kohli won her second title in 1980.

“I hope I can be proud of Yvonne,” Barty said on the court, before turning away from the microphone as she started choking.

She later explained how much Goolagong Cawley meant to her.

“Yvonne is a very special person in my life,” Barty said. “I think she has been creative in paving the way for young Aboriginal people to believe in their dreams and chase their dreams. She did exactly that for me too. And I think being able to share that with her and share some really special victories now with her, [and] Being able to create my own way is really incredible, really exciting.”

Barty has held the top spot in the rankings since September 2019. Some have questioned the legitimacy of the revised ranking system and her first place as she chose to skip the remainder of the 2020 season once it resumed, but now leaves no doubt. . She is 2,299 points ahead of second seed Naomi Osaka in the hard court season and will be the favorite at the upcoming Olympics and US Open.

Wimbledon holds its fourth title, and fifth final, this year. She is now the third woman to win multiple Grand Slam titles since the start of the 2017 season, joining Osaka and Simona Halep, and no one has won more WTA titles during that time than Barty with 12.

Barty didn’t talk about her ranking or her place among the sport’s last stars on Saturday. She seemed more than satisfied with enjoying the moment that had long gone by.

“Dreams don’t always come true, but you can fight and do whatever you can to give yourself that chance,” Barty said before the tournament. “This has been a lot of what I’ve learned over the past two years as a person, not just as a professional tennis player, but as a person, putting my hopes and dreams into the universe and chasing them.”

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