The Ukrainian Mom on the Brink of the Wimbledon Final

livemint.com:

Over the past two seasons, Ukrainian tennis player Elina Svitolina has taken two major breaks from the professional game for reasons that couldn’t be farther apart. Early last year, exhausted physically from injuries and mentally from watching Russia invade her home country, tennis was suddenly and profoundly irrelevant to her. Then in October of that year, she put tennis on the back burner again for a happier reason: She and her husband, the French player Gaël Monfils, welcomed their first child.

Neither of those pauses, whose significance dwarfed anything that happened on the court, would normally be the launchpad to a dramatic career revival. And yet Svitolina, after some 13 months off the tour, is most definitely back. She is a new mother.

She is flying the flag for Ukraine in professional sports. And she is one match away from a Wimbledon final. “I think having a child, and war, made me a different person," said Svitolina, a former world No.

3 who is unseeded here and received a wild card invitation back into the All England Club. “I look at things a bit differently." No one is more surprised to be in this spot than Svitolina herself—she had even made plans to go see Harry Styles perform in Vienna last weekend. But despite facing the toughest draw of any woman at the tournament, she has just kept winning.

Svitolina extended the streak on Tuesday by upsetting world No. 1 Iga Swiatek on Centre Court, 7-5, 6-7(5), 6-2. With the crowd behind her, she served brilliantly to fight back from being down 3-5 in the first set and held her nerve in a tense third as Swiatek struggled to cope with her power.