“It’s like they’re shooting you” | Relief

“I’m done”. In the last months of 2021, in the midst of an ordeal of injuries, Milos Raonic told those around him that that’s enough, that’s enough,that his body did not respond and that he threw in the towel. She had undergone surgery several times and her Achilles tendon was causing her headaches. The months passed and the situation did not improve.

His last game had been in July 2021 in Atlanta. He finished that year and still had not recovered. He spent all of 2022 and there was no news of Milos Raonic on the circuit. He was left without ranking. The man who became number three in the ranking in 2016, when he reached the Wimbledon final, disappeared from the map.

“A lot of times I didn’t even want to bother trying, because I felt so far away. There were moments when I thought yes, I was finished. At the end of 2021 he had no intention of playing again.”said the Canadian in June 2023, when he returned to competition.

“Once I started to feel a little better, I wanted to play tennis just to stay in shape. It’s true that I started playing golf five hours a day, but I realized it wasn’t for me,” he added. “Wanting to return cost a lot. It took a lot of energy from me. But I’m happy to have gotten here and I’m very grateful to be able to play“.

Not that his life has been a bed of roses since then. In the last twelve months he has barely been able to complete 18 matches and is currently ranked 186 in the world ranking. Something is something to a man who knowsHe underwent four operations – hip, feet and wrist – and had several muscle mishaps and a very complicated Achilles tendon injury. That last one, suffered in 2021, was the beginning of his particular way of the cross.

He was diagnosed with up to five small tears in the tendon and Raonic opted for conservative treatment to avoid surgery. When he was beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel, In mid-2022 he dropped a weight on his foot while working out at the gym. Then he suffered a torn calf and, to make matters worse, contracted covid.

Record of aces in a match

All the effort he put in to be able to return to the circuit has allowed him to break a huge record this Monday, the most aces in a best of three sets match. The Canadian connected 47 aces and saved two match points to beat Cameron Norrie 6-7 (6-8), 6-3 and 7-6 (11-9) in the first round of the Queen’s tournament. The previous record was Ivo Karlovic’s 45 against Tomas Berdycg in 2015 in Halle, also on grass.

“My serve has always been the most important shot for me. This is something special, something significant. A fun statistic to be proud of“said the Canadian tennis player on Monday afternoon.

His serve, a bomb

Born in 1990 in Podgorica, in the former Yugoslavia, his family emigrated to Canada in 1994 and there he began playing tennis. He grew up ten minutes from the stadium where the Toronto Masters 1000 is played and his explosion came in 2014, when he reached the semifinals of Wimbledon. But His big year would come in 2016, just when he signed Carlos Moyà to his bench..

With Nadal’s current coach in his box, Raonic He reached the semifinals in Australia, the final of Wimbledon and placed third in the world rankings. Everything supported by a serve from another planet. Its service reached 249.9 kilometers per hour in 2012, but beyond the speed, what makes it really dangerous is its variety.

“You feel like a goalkeeper when a penalty is taken, as if you were being shot“, said Moyà in an interview with El Español during his time as Raonic’s coach. “Apart from being his best shot, it is a very complicated serve because it has many effects. The cut, the short, the flat, the body… it is very difficult to read and subtract it. The directions vary quite a bit. Suddenly, he does a kick serve and goes up to the net, serves to the body…”