Hard data is impossible to come by. But how many sports careers were diminished, if not outright ruined, by COVID-19? How many athletes coordinated their training to peak for the 2020 Olympics … only to lose timing (and motivation) when the games were postponed a year? How many college athletes never recovered from losing that spring season? How many skiers and rowers and football players, crushing it in the fall of 2019, never got their mojo back?
Now comes Barbora Krejčíková on the other side of the net. In 2019, she was 24 and a star doubles player on the WTA Tour. But she had no singles profile to speak of, failing to crack the top 100 playing solo.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. In her native Czech Republic—where coronavirus rates were relatively low, and therefore restrictions were relatively lax—she spent the pandemic dedicating herself to training. Some tennis on the court. But mostly conditioning. She went for runs in the natural beauty of her hometown of Brno. She added some strength for durability. She worked on flexibility. When play resumed in the latter half of 2020, Krejčíková promptly shaved 50 points off her singles ranking, which included finally achieving her long-held goal of holding a double-digit ranking.
