Alex De Minaur makes decision on retiring after devastating Wimbledon loss | Tennis | Sport
A despondent Alex de Minaur has vowed to take a break from tennis after his latest Wimbledon exit left him feeling his dreams are getting further away. But the Australian isn’t ready to retire just yet and feels he has no choice but to get up and go again after some time out following a defeat that “hurts like hell”. De Minaur took on Flavio Cobolli on Court 1 with his fiancee Katie Boulter watching on in an England football shirt after the Three Lions’ World Cup win over Mexico hours earlier. He lost a tight first set to the Italian and failed to serve out for the second before ultimately losing 5-7, 6-7, 3-6.
It leaves the Australian as one of the sport’s nearly men as far as Grand Slams are concerned. He has 11 career ATP Tour titles but has never got beyond the quarter-finals of a Slam. He is due to defend his Washington Open title at the end of July but his schedule for the coming months looks uncertain if his comments in SW19 are anything to go by. “I won’t play a tournament for a while,” De Minaur said. “But again,, they just accumulate, right? The goals, the beliefs, the dreams that you have, they kind of start fading away or they feel a little bit further away than when they once were.”
He continued: “I’m finding it harder. That’s the reality of it. At the end of the day, I’ve got no other option, right? I’m not going to say ‘I’ve had enough, I’m hanging up the racquets’.
“It’s fresh now. It hurts like hell now. But I’ll get back up. I’m a competitor, through and through. So I’ll get back up, and I’ll give myself another chance.
“I just want it to kind of happen to keep giving me that hope. If not, this is a tough, tough sport to play with with no hope.”
De Minaur and Boulter are due to get married later this summer. And the 27-year-old is ready to focus on his personal life rather than dwelling on his latest on-court setback.
“I’ve got some pretty big things happening soon, so some stuff that I’m very excited for,” he added. “I think my best way forward is to channel my focus into that, into something positive.”
The Sydney star’s best Wimbledon run came in 2024, when he reached the quarter-finals but withdrew from his match against Novak Djokovic with a hip injury. He has also reached the last eight of the Australian Open in the each of the last two years, the French Open in 2024 and the US Open on three separate occasions but has never got further.
This time, there was little he could do against an in-form Cobolli. “From my side, I think I played one of the best match ever, especially on this surface that is always tough to play,” the Italian said.
“But today I found a way to have a high level for, I don’t know how much I played, but for all the match. It was really impressive also for me, for my team.”
