Grand Slam winner Ana Ivanovic shocked the tennis community when she decided to retire a few days before the start of the 2017 season, despite presumably being in her physical prime at 29 years old.
Ivanovic, who was champion of Roland Garros (aka the French Open) in 2008 and one of the world’s top players at the time she retired, revealed in a recent interview that dealing with panic attacks factored into the her decision to step away from tennis.
“During the last years of my career, I experienced very severe panic attacks whenever I had to walk onto the court. I never talked about it, but the panic attacks were incredibly intense,” Ivanovic said, per an X post from @tennis_photos.
She then added, “People would wonder what suddenly happened in the middle of a match, why my game would fall apart but the truth is that I’d be overcome by panic and simply couldn’t go on. Then I’d be overwhelmed by the fear of having to go out and play in front of people again the next day.”
Ivanovic deserves a lot of credit for being willing to open up about what she was going through. Every athlete deals with mental hurdles, especially when the stakes are as high as they were during Ivanovic’s peak.
And learning that she was dealing with panic attacks is jarring, to say the least. It takes even more courage to admit this publicly, given that some might try to use this and claim that she’s making excuses for her shortcomings when the lights were brightest.
Ivanovic has been in the news for other reasons in the past year. Her divorce with German soccer star and 2014 FIFA World Cup winner Bastian Schweinsteiger made headlines in 2025.
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