New York (AFP) – American Emma Navarro, a three-time WTA tournament champion, revealed a three-year battle with health issues on Wednesday, battling against her body as she found success on the court. Navarro, ranked 24th in the world, said she will skip the remainder of the 2026 campaign to prepare herself for a 2027 Australia return.
“I’m taking the rest of this year to work on dialing in my medication and fueling protocols so that I can hopefully feel back to 100% again,” Navarro wrote in an emotional Instagram post. Navarro won the WTA Strasbourg title in May, was runner-up in June at Nottingham, and reached her fourth Grand Slam quarter-final at this month’s US Open.
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But the 25-year-old said her dizziness and headaches from under-fueling her body only faded for her to feel comfortable a couple of months ago. “I felt able to play tennis as myself again…to compete without it taking the life out of me,” she wrote. Navarro said she was diagnosed last year with RED-S (relative energy deficiency in sport), where the body does not receive the energy needed to support daily life and physical activity, and “Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism.”
After meeting with doctors and specialists last November, she was told she had been under-fueling for years and her body was fighting back. “Over the past year I have gone all in,” she said. “Although it took me a while to start feeling better, I gradually made progress. I began eating what my body needed to recover from the deficit I had been in.”
“So yeah, I gained some weight this year, but I also gained my life back. I have enough energy to seize every day, to train and compete as hard as I want to and to live a life outside of tennis.” Navarro said in 2023 she began feeling frustrated and angry and became sick often. “I couldn’t think straight a lot of the time,” she wrote. “I had trouble remembering things and articulating thoughts. My brain felt slow and tired, as did my body.”
She reached as high as eighth in world rankings after a 2024 US Open semi-final run but became ill in China weeks later. “I couldn’t see the ball. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t play. I couldn’t even feel,” she wrote.
© 2024 AFP
