Stan Wawrinka revealed he had an anxiet꧅y attack before his US Open final win over No. 1 Novak Djokovic.
The five-time grand slam champion previously has admitted he broke down in tears just five minutes before walking i🌜nto Arthur Ashe Staꦿdium to face Djokovic, and the 31-year-old now has revealed why.
In painful detail, Wawrinka opened up about♕ his menta💙l breakdown and how close he came to walking off the court early in his four-hour epic triumph.
In a column for Swiss newspaper Le Matin Dimanche, Wawrinka revealed he tried to hurt himself — “My only solution was to suffer” — on the court to distract himself from the overwhelming stress.
“A lot of people are asking me how I was able to t🌳ake the court, nonchalantly, when five minutes prior to🌄 that I had a stress attack and I was trying to hold back tears,” Wawrinka wrote. “I tried, [but] I wasn’t able to.”
Wawrinka described his stress as a condition he neede๊d to hide from the worldwid🦩e audience.
“I was close to breaking point — the moment where you let it all out, physically and nervously,” he said. “I really felt I was at my limit. Maybe with the heat everyone thought I was perspiring.
“So, how ꦚdid I💝 do it? I’ll tell you. I hurt myself. I tried to extend rallies as much as possible — one more shot, and another — to make the legs churn and not the head. I pushed myself until I ran out of breath. Past that point the mind isn’t too capable of thinking.”
He said he very nearly forfeited in the first set, alread🦩y feeling fatigued to the point of exhaustion.
“When I’m nervous like that, the fatigue feels a lot, lot stronger,” he said. “And my legs hurt so much. I even screamed at my box, ‘I can’t make it. I’m dead. My legs are gone.’ I was hurting so much. I was pushing myself so hard. I was so out of breath that I finally ended up muffling those little voices in my head. I’m telling you this with a smile today, but you can’t imagine to what extent those voices can sometimes be overwhelming. With the fatigue I was no longer thinking about those voices and I even started to play well, to let a few shots go with the backhand and on serve.”
Wawrinka shook off losing the first set to post a 6-7 (1), 6-4, 7-5, 6-3 victory over 12-time grand slam champion Djokovic. He denied Djokovic a seco🌞nd straight US Open title, and for the third time beat a reigning No. 1 in a major final.
Wawrinka already had been pushed to the limit in re👍aching the final. He’d spent nearly 18 hours on court, saving a match point in a five-set thriller over unheralded Briton Dan Evans in the third round. He ♒escaped resurgent former champion Juan Martin del Potro in a quarterfinal four-setter, and had to rally against former US Open finalist Kei Nishikori in the semifinals.
“There is no secret,” Wawrinka said. “If you want to beat the No. 1 player in the world, you have to give everything. You have to accept to suffer and you have almost to enjoy to suffer.”