The Martina Trevisan tale isn’t merely one of fighting to overcome challenges of a sport, but also of conquering obstacles in life. The Italian’s French Open run was ended by Coco Gauff in a straight-sets semi-final defeat, but this is her best-ever Grand Slam performance thus far. It has come at the age of 28, more than a decade after she was primed to take the big professional leap in tennis as a junior doubles semi-finalist at French Open and Wimbledon at 16. Right then, the teen put her racquet aside.
Martina Trevisan clenches her fist after scoring a point against Coco Gauff during their semifinal match at the French Open (AP)
Trevisan was dealing with anorexia, an eating disorder that compels people to eat less for the fear of gaining weight. According to a 2004 study by USA’s National Center for Biotechnology Information conducted on Norwegian elites, anorexia and other such eating disorders is “higher in female athletes than in male athletes, and more common among those competing in leanness-dependent and weight-dependent sports than in other sports”.
Trevisan’s ever-decreasing appetite would barely be enough for her to stand upright for an extended period of time, let alone sprint across a tennis court for hours together to fetch balls. “I hated my muscular body and imposed on myself diets on the verge of survival to lose weight,” Trevisan said, detailing her struggles in a tell-all blog on The Owl Post in 2020. “30 grams of cereals and a fruit in the evening. It was enough for me to stand up, and to worry my mother, that she ran to pick peaches from the trees just to see me eat something.”
Trevisan eventually realised she needed help with the complexities of the disorder. The youngster sought professional treatment, which entailed her getting “re-educated to eat”. “To make peace with my wounds. To appreciate my new body,” she said in the blog. “Almost without realising it I found myself again with a racket in hand.”
It wasn't to play professionally but try her hand at coaching at a local club in her city of Florence. Back to the sport she loved as a kid, her competitive juices couldn’t be kept at bay for too long. In 2014, four years after she walked away, a 20-year-old Trevisan returned to the professional tour, ranked 893rd in the world in her reappearance on the WTA charts in September 2014.
Trevisan spent the next five years grinding on the ITF tour—the lower rung of professional tennis—and kept stumbling at the qualifying hurdle at Grand Slams while persisting away. Her first bite of the main draw cherry was at the 2020 Australian Open when she finally got through the three qualifiers to set up a first-round date with Sofia Kenin. The Italian lost to the eventual champion, although bigger things would be in store for Trevisan post the pandemic-induced break.
After winning the three qualifying matches at the 2020 French Open in October, the southpaw stitched a giant-killing run that saw the then world No 159 sweep past the likes of Coco Gauff, Maria Sakkari and Kiki Bertens to book a quarter-final spot. Iga Swiatek, who also went on to win the title, stopped her there but not before the Italian left her mark with her most productive Slam show.
Two years on, she has bettered that on the same courts of Roland Garros. The 28-year-old’s path was undoubtedly made smoother by the mass exodus of the top 10 seeds in the first week, but she showed her mettle in defeating the 17th seed Leylah Fernandez, the 2021 US Open finalist, in a three-set quarter-final.
The world No 59 also came to Paris riding the high of winning her first WTA title in the week preceding the French Open. Trevisan stunned the top seed and 10th-ranked Garbine Muguruza in the Round of 16 of the WTA 250 event in Rabat, Morocco and went all the way.
Trevisan is enjoying her tennis and, more importantly, the way she is living her life.
"I think everybody has an important life," Trevisan said after her French Open quarter-final win. "I think the importance is, who I am right now, that I'm happy on the court. I'm doing what I love. So my past is the past, and it helped me to be in the present, to be what I am right now.”
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