NextGen star Andrey Rublev hints at mental health issues during injury rehab in revealing interview
Russian star Andrey Rublev suffered a stress fracture to his back during the 2018 season and has subsequently revealed how difficult he found the mental side of not being able to playing during his rehabilitation
Andrey Rublev had reached his highest ranking of 31 in the world early in the 2018 season when he was suddenly diagnosed with a stress fracture of the lower back soon after the Monte Carlo Masters. This lead to 3 months of lay off with compete rest for the first 2 months. In a brutally honest post on the ‘Behind The Racquet‘ series he opens up about how difficult he found this period of his career.
Rublev said, “It was last year when I sadly had a stress fracture in my lower back. It kept me out of competition for three months. It was an incredibly tough time for me which led to some depression.” He went on to say, “I was born to compete and now I couldn’t and that’s where moments of depression came from. I would try to not keep up with any results from tournaments. Any time I did, by accident, it would make me really upset to see other players doing something I couldn’t at the time. While I began to watch matches I almost got that same feeling of competition that I would get from playing, but then it would be overtaken by sadness when I knew it would be some time until I could do it again.”
Read the full interview here:
Andrey Rublev is now ranked 78 in the world and holds a 9-9 win/loss record on the ATP main tour in 2019. In 2018 he reached the semi finals of the ATP Next Generation tournament which is open to the best performing players under the age of 21. Rublev’s only career title on the ATP was the Umag clay court event in Croatia in 2017.
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