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Leander: 'I'm getting fitter, stronger...I'm back'
In his 30 years of playing professional tennis, the 18-time Grand Slam champion has never had 11 months off like he did from March last year, a season that was meant to be Paes’s “One Last Roar” but instead saw him switch off totally from the sport.
Leander Paes wasn’t sure if anybody noticed, so he said it anyway. “I’ve lost six kilos in the last three weeks,” the 47-year-old said on Tuesday.
The veteran Indian tennis pro was back to playing tennis three weeks ago, hitting the courts at Khar Gymkhana in Mumbai to add to his physical training at his home gym.
“I’m getting fit, I’m getting strong,” Paes said. “And… Lee’s back,” he added with an unmistakable glee on his face. “Lee’s slowly getting back.”
In his 30 years of playing professional tennis, the 18-time Grand Slam champion has never had 11 months off like he did from March last year, a season that was meant to be Paes’s “One Last Roar” but instead saw him switch off totally from the sport. Paes last competed in the first week of March 2020, pairing up with Rohan Bopanna to beat the higher-ranked Croatian pair of Mate Pavic (current world No. 3 in doubles) and Franko Skugor in India's Davis Cup Qualifier.
Running on reserves, the pandemic provided Paes a breather to refuel. “The reason I chose last year as my One Last Roar season was that I was jaded. I was tired—of the travel, of the effort that it takes to play at this level, from the years of wear and tear,” Paes said on the sidelines of the Tennis Premier League auctions here on Tuesday.
When he returned to the courts after almost a year, it was more as an over-enthusiastic kid in the park than someone three months shy of turning 48. Paes put in eight-hour sessions in his first week back earlier this month. “I went too hard too fast,” Paes admitted. “And then my body just collapsed. It was so sore a couple of days, I couldn’t move, I was just lying in bed.
“Now I’m over that hump of the pain. I’m slowly finding that rhythm and enhancing that, doing six-hour daily sessions. But the quality and intensity of it is very high. It takes a lot more effort now at this age to get the same result compared to when you’re 25 or 35. But I feel like I’m on the right track. The body feels good, but most importantly, mentally I feel happy. I wasn’t feeling that in 2019,” he added.
Paes hasn’t yet firmed up a definite schedule to return to the professional tour but has circled out a few key tournaments on the calendar.
“I know the French Open is end of May, Wimbledon is end of June and then the Olympics from the end of July. I haven’t built a schedule yet. I’ll first get ready and then look at that,” he said.
Among those events, the Tokyo Olympics might well be circled in bold. For, Paes again reiterated his desire to make it to an eighth consecutive Games and extend his record for the most Olympic appearances by any tennis player as the big driving factor. Currently world No. 139 in the ATP doubles rankings, Paes is the fifth-highest ranked Indian. Bopanna (42nd) and Divij Sharan (66th), the duo that paired up to win the 2018 Asian Games gold, will need to boost their rankings further by June this year if they are to qualify together as one of the 32 men’s doubles teams. Paes, the singles bronze medallist from the 1996 Atlanta Games, is aware of that.
“I believe that Rohan and Divij have not qualified as a team (so far); their individual results have not been so good. We need to send the best team (at the Olympics) that has a chance to win a medal. I think that is what drives me forward,” Paes said.
Whether it’ll be Bopanna-Sharan or Bopanna-Paes or any other combination at Tokyo is subject for another day a few months down the line. That he is back on his tennis journey, and happy at that, is most important for Paes right now as he rebuilds towards competing at the highest level. “I’m really enjoying the passion again for training as a champion. It’s one thing training to be fit, but to train as a champion is very tough. I’m very happy to be back on that journey again. And I’m having fun with it,” he said.
