US Open: Amanda Anisimova's full range

Amanda Anisimova loves to paint. Picking up her brushes, sketching impressionist shapes on the canvas, inspired by the world of Van Gogh, and forgetting the sound of the balls for a while. A recent passion that serves as an outlet. “I started to get interested in art when I wasn’t feeling well mentally ,” said the American, a great fan of the Musée d’Orsay, during her two weeks at Wimbledon. “It’s something I did in my free time, to clear my mind.” She started painting a few years earlier, in October 2022. “I always loved art when I was younger, so I bought some canvases, some paints and I thought I would try it for fun. And then it became a routine every week,” she says on the WTA website. "I wanted to find things I enjoyed doing alone, rather than just seeing people and spending time with them. It felt good mentally to get away from my phone, from everything else, for a few hours."

In New York, on the green and blue-stained Arthur Ashe court, the tanned 24-year-old right-hander may be on the verge of achieving her greatest masterpiece this Saturday: a victory in the US Open final against world number 1 and defending champion Aryna Sabalenka . Anisimova leads 6-3 in her confrontations with the Belarusian. The most recent one is very recent. It was in the Wimbledon semi-finals in July. In the final, Anisimova collapsed, paralyzed, "paralyzed by stage fright." She left in tears, weighed down by a reality she would not have even imagined in her worst nightmare: a "double bubble," 6-0, 6-0, against Iga Swiatek.

Such a setback would have shaken the psyche of most current players for quite some time. But at 24, the current world number 8 took it as if she were ten years older. Over the years, she has built herself up precisely to overcome this kind of execrable Sunday. When she met the Pole in the quarterfinals on Thursday, she dispatched her in two straight sets (6-4, 6-3). "It just shows that I've worked very hard, especially on the mental side," she said.

From Wimbledon, she kept in mind that reaching the final was no small feat, as she was still ranked 442nd in the world when she returned to competition in January 2024. She was coming off a long break, taken in the spring of 2023. "Sometimes, you imagine going back in time and you tell yourself that you could have done things differently. But that decision, I would take it back ten times out of ten," she assured L'Equipe at the beginning of the year. At the time, in an Instagram post, she explained that she had been battling burnout since the summer of 2022. She wrote in particular: " It has become unbearable to play in a tournament."

During her break, Anisimova was able to experience a normal life. Taking her business and psychology classes in person for a semester at Nova Southeastern University in Florida. Or spending time with her friends, having spent her entire schooling, her entire childhood, online.

Anisimova was born in Freehold Township, New Jersey, less than 100 kilometers from the courts of Flushing Meadows, to Russian parents. She speaks the language, but “never considered representing Russia,” she told the New York Times in 2017. Originally from Moscow, they moved to America in the late 1990s, hoping to provide more opportunities for their first daughter, Maria, then 10. Amanda’s older sister was, long before Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, her first source of inspiration. It was while accompanying her to her college tennis lessons, when the family moved to Florida, that Amanda discovered the sport around age 3. She has always been coached by her father, Konstantin Anisimov. With Nick Saviano in the role of mentor. A former trainer of Sloane Stephens and Eugénie Bouchard, the man has worked with her since she was 11 years old, at her academy in Plantation, a northern suburb of Miami, thirty minutes from Aventura, another town where Anisimova learned to play.

Technically precocious, explosive, and powerful, she quickly stood out among her age group. She was only 15 when she received a wild card (invitation) to take part in Roland-Garros in 2016. She was the youngest to receive this invitation since Alizé Cornet in 2005. That same year, she won the junior US Open, beating another Floridian prodigy even younger than her: Cori Coco Gauff, aged 13.

Her compatriots were quick to compare her to the greatest. Since her first WTA title, won in 2019 on clay beaten in Bogota, at 17, when she became the youngest American to lift a trophy since Serena Williams in 1999. The same year, at Porte d'Auteuil, Anisimova eliminated defending champion Simona Halep, then world number 3, in the quarterfinals. Before falling to the future winner Ashleigh Barty. No matter, her Parisian epic suddenly thrust her into the spotlight, and the world said that the best was yet to come.

That same summer, a few days before the opening of the US Open, her father and coach's heart stopped. He was 52 years old. She hardly ever mentions it, but the tragedy brought her rise to a screeching halt. Returning after a six-month break, the results didn't follow. At least not right away. She had to wait until January 2022 and a WTA 250 tournament in preparation for the Australian Open in Melbourne to claim her second title.

Without knowing it yet, the beginnings of her burnout were already surrounding her. “I was struggling to manage my lifestyle and I was under a lot of stress, which was really weighing on me on the court ,” she told the Guardian . “Especially towards the end of the year. I think it was ruining a lot of the joy I felt in training or at tournaments. It really didn’t suit me.”

Her decision to temporarily retire from the tour, and the redemption that followed, as she won the WTA 1000 in Doha in February, her biggest career title, could serve as an example to other players facing the same problems. In the same way, Anisimova praises her colleague Naomi Osaka for being one of the pioneers on mental health in sport in 2021, when the Japanese player left Roland-Garros , explaining that she suffered from stress and depression. The same Osaka that Anisimova defeated in the semi-finals on Thursday, after losing the first set, in a bitter duel between returnees. "This tournament means so much to me," she said emotionally on the court. Since she was little, Anisimova has "only considered one thing: winning the tournament." By overcoming the boss, Sabalenka, in front of her home crowd, there is no doubt that the picture would be perfect.