Former world No. 1 Kim Clijsters has announced her third and likely final retirement from tennis.
Clijsters, a four-time Grand Slam champion, retired for the first time in May 2007 but came out of retirement two years later in 2009.
It didn’t take long for Clijsters to find her game as she won back-to-back US Open titles in 2009 and 2010, and also won the Australian Open in 2011.
Three years after coming out of her first retirement, Clijsters announced her second retirement.
Clijsters stayed retired for eight years before she came out of retirement for the second time at the beginning of the 2020 season.
This time, Clijsters didn’t win a Grand Slam after returning to the game.
Shortly after Clijsters came out of her second retirement, the pandemic started and it halted the Belgian’s plans.
Clijsters played in just three events last year and went 0-3
“Yeah, it’s been on my mind for a while,” Clijsters told WTA Insider. “I still love to hit the ball. With my schedule three, four days was enough to keep my rhythm under control but definitely not good enough if I decided to play another tournament. Say, if I picked Australia, it’s three, four weeks. That’s just not possible at this stage in our family life.
“Life just sort of takes over, right?”
Clijsters is walking away from the game with no regrets.
“I think my determination was something as a little girl that was a huge factor,” Clijsters said. “This is something that came from my parents – they always pushed me in believing, ‘OK, what you do for your sport, you have to do it 100 percent.’ To this day, I think about what my dad said: `You have to realize at the end of your career you can’t regret not giving it everything you had.’
“And out of everything, that’s probably what I’m most proud of – that I really did that. From the moment I stepped on court and, whether it was practice or a match, I was committed. I was there to try my best.”