Australian Open: Ashleigh Barty - A sporting moment for Australia
Ashleigh Barty created a sporting moment in her home country on Saturday.
by Jörg Allmeroth
last edit: Jan 30, 2022, 05:01 pm
It would have been the biggest story not only for Australia on every final day in recent years. The story of the eccentric bad boy Nick Kyrgios and his doubles sworn partner Thanasi Kokkinakis, who, as wild card starters, irresistibly catapulted themselves to the Melbourne Grand Slam throne - as a very special duo infernale, which regularly teased opponents to the boil and at the same time caused spectacle -Tennis at its best up to the cup coup.
But Kyrgios and Kokkinakis, the two hellhounds in tennis paradise, only played a supporting role on January 29, 2022 in the shadow of a much larger story - a moment in sporting history for the fifth continent. It was Ashleigh Barty , the 25-year-old world no Collins out of the body. "A dream becomes true. I'm so proud to be Australian," Barty said alongside her idol Evonne Goolagong Cawley (70) - the former world-class player and seven-time Grand Slam winner had acted as master of ceremonies when the Daphne Akhurst Cup was presented. The last successful Australian soloist to date, the 1978 winner Chris O'Neil, was also one of the eyewitnesses to the intoxicating Barty party on Center Court.
Massive pressure in Melbourne
Since the 1980s, many Australian greats had repeatedly recorded outstanding successes in their career certificates, Pat Cash and Lleyton Hewitt won at Wimbledon, Patrick Rafter and Samantha Stosur landed triumphal moves in the US Open. But at their own Grand Slam in Melbourne, the Australian stars were always under such massive pressure and stress that title attempts often ended in huge disappointments. No wonder Australia's former world-class doubles player Todd Woodbridge has now described Barty's groundbreaking success as the "most important moment" for the sporting nation of Australia since Cathy Freeman's Olympic victory in Sydney in 2000. An Australian of Indigenous descent like Barty and Goolagong-Cawley, Freeman was also one of the first personal well-wishers at the Rod Laver arena. "It's destiny fulfilled," headlined the local Herald Sun.
For the Australians, Barty embodies the ideal image of a sportswoman, in the tradition of those aces who ruled the tennis world unpretentiously and scandal-free between 1950 and 1970. The mid-twenty-something also manages her career without affectation and vanity, sometimes she seems like a foreign body in the glitter and glamor industry, where appearances are often enough deceptive. The number 1 in the world is more like the girl next door - uncomplicated, modest, down to earth, natural, normal in the best sense of the word. "She doesn't need to see her face in the newspaper every day to be happy," says Martina Navratilova, the doyen. "She's the 'real deal'. A great guy.” Billie Jean King, the founder of modern tennis, now considers Barty to be the true sporting heir of the dying era of the Williams sisters – she has everything, according to the American, “to play the leading role for years to come.”
Barty's career has by no means been a straight line. In 2011, the compact athlete won the junior women's final at Wimbledon, at the tender age of 15 at the time. Rapid success on the adult tour followed, particularly with doubles partner and best friend Casey Dellaqua. In 2014, in an initial performance crisis, Barty decided on radical therapy - she left the traveling circus without returning, finally taking almost two years off: "The stress had become overwhelming. I was a victim of my own success.” She even switched to the Australian cricket league for a while, played golf and basketball – all the talent that cuts a fine figure in any sport. "She would not only be a world-class athlete on Center Court," says her coach Craig Tyzzer.
US Open are still missing
But here, on the global tour of tennis nomads, she has now become a standout figure. In 2019 she won the Grand Slam title in Paris with her flexible, varied, unpredictable tennis, and last summer she won the Wimbledon tournament. Now the crowning glory in Melbourne - and with it the victory on all surfaces that challenge a professional at Grand Slam level: sand, grass, hard court. What is still missing for the career Grand Slam is the trophy in New York, at the US Open. "She'll do that sooner rather than later," Chris Evert, the US icon, is certain. According to Evert, Barty could definitely “win up to ten more Grand Slams.” She had recently missed a few chances voluntarily, in the first Corona year 2020 she refrained from further business trips after the early season and stayed at home with family and friends .
Chasing away the demons of failure in Melbourne, having left all the futile missions behind - it was, for Barty, the "happiest experience I've ever had as an athlete." And there was no one quite like this sympathetically normal leader of women's tennis had not allowed success. "Nobody deserves it more" than Barty, tweeted the three-time Grand Slam winner Angelique Kerber on Saturday to the front woman, who has now been at the top of the tennis hit list for 113 weeks. More big victories are in prospect for Barty, as well as more career milestones. But nothing will change in her credo, in her philosophy of life, which she formulated last year: "Being a good person is my priority every day."
Here is the women's individual tableau
laver arena