‘It’s a bit bionic now’: Inside Operation Kyrgios, and why his comeback will be short-lived

Operation Kyrgios has been running for 18 months in an underground Canberra gym.

Its focus has been on the obscure ligaments and sinews of Australia’s most outrageously talented tennis player.

And its success will be measured by whether multiple medical experts can be defied by returning Nick Kyrgios to the grand slam circuit, beginning with the Australian Open.

Nick Kyrgios hard at work at The Den in Canberra.Credit: Ben Patrick

Kyrgios was in a bad way when he started training at The Den after undergoing radical wrist reconstruction surgery normally reserved for plumbers and other tradies who’ve sustained a contact injury on a worksite.

“I wasn’t even able to hold grocery bags or twist the doorknob,” Kyrgios explains in an interview with Nine’s A Current Affair. “It wasn’t even about tennis. I wasn’t able to live without pain.”

The pain was coming from the scapholunate ligament in his right wrist, which stabilises the joint. He’d injured it at the 2015 Indian Wells tournament when he fell during a match against Grigor Dimitrov. Kyrgios was told that if he didn’t get immediate surgery, he’d have to undergo even bigger surgery later in his career.

Kyrgios has been on a long comeback from a serious wrist injury.Credit: Sunny Southwell

“I was 19 years old, I wasn’t going to have wrist surgery,” he says. He gambled that he could keep playing using the two undamaged wrist ligaments. By 2022, the injury was excruciating. An MRI found the bad tear had become a full-blown rupture.

“Multiple surgeons said that whatever surgery you want to get on this wrist, it wasn’t going to be likely that you’re going to come back playing high-level tennis.”

Four holes and a piece of string

He secretly went under the knife of Adelaide surgeon Dr Michael Sandow, who used three-dimensional anatomical mapping to stabilise and heal Kyrgios’ wrist by stitching four of his carpal bones with fine thread.

“It’s a bit bionic now. It’s got four holes in it, and a piece of ‘string’ that they put in there, holding it all together,” says Kyrgios, 29.

The job of trainer Mick Mackell, co-owner of The Den, and physiotherapist Will Maher has been to devise ways of resurrecting Kyrgios’ reconstructed wrist into the weapon that took him to the 2022 Wimbledon final.

Mackell and Maher told him to be patient but six months out from the surgery he was still experiencing pain. At nine months, the pain subsided.

The trainer and physio have tailored his exercises to steadily strengthen the joint. Kyrgios drags a sled with a 100-kilogram weight up and down the side wall of the gym.

Kyrgios drags a sled at the gym.Credit: Ben Patrick

Mackell then attaches a giant rubber band to a hand grip and Kyrgios uses his exquisite footwork to play an invisible backhand before switching to an elegant forehand swish. Despite the industrial set-up, it’s working to restore the poetry to Kyrgios’ movement.

“His fitness is great, really, really good,” Mackell says. “He’s improved enormously. From what he says and from what his physio Will says, it’s the fittest he’s ever felt.”

But as ever for Kyrgios, tennis isn’t just a fight on the court – it’s the one upstairs, too.

“I’ve got serious demons in my head,” he says. “I definitely deal with them better now than I have, but yeah, it’s always been a bit of a roller-coaster out there, especially when I’m playing in the Australian Open or Wimbledon.

“It’s four or five hours out there on your own, you start hearing some voices in your head, and you can have some pretty dark conversations with yourself.”

‘Super-talented, out of shape and a smart arse’

The game in which he is a genius is a lonely one, and yet Kyrgios has always preferred team sport. Basketball is his great love.

So he surrounds himself with friends and fellow players to spur him through gym sessions and then two to three hours on indoor courts at Lyneham.

Childhood friend and fellow tennis player James Frawley, 30, is the closest thing Kyrgios has to a coach. “Frawls”, as Kyrgios calls him, trains alongside him and is there to “make sure I don’t go off the rails”.

Kyrgios hard at work in the gym.Credit: Ben Patrick

He has other regular company including Melbourne’s Stefan Vujic, 26, and 18-year-old rising star Charlie Camus from Canberra.

They help with the routine and you get the impression that without them, he wouldn’t train so hard or so regularly. They joke around a bit but they go hard, too, measuring each other’s effort in sweat.

When a teenager and top junior player, Kyrgios remembers a tennis scout describing him as “super-talented, out of shape and a smart arse”.

That was 13 years ago, Kyrgios says, “and nothing’s really changed – except I’m pretty much in shape now”.

But the inveterate larrikin knows what it’s taken to get him fit for grand slam tennis. Which, he says, is why he’s been so outspoken on doping following recent positive tests by top players, saying tennis was “cooked”.

“After everything that I’ve gone through the last year-and-a-half, I would never dope in tennis,” he says. “It’s a bit of a middle finger to people like me that have had almost career-ending injuries and doing it correctly.”

Kyrgios is doubtful that the game’s integrity unit will properly deal with offenders.

“I don’t know if I have the faith that they’re going to get what they kind of deserve in a way,” Kyrgios says.

How long does Kyrgios have left?

Losing the 2022 Wimbledon final to Novak Djokovic after being one set up, and then tumbling into a long lay-off through potentially career-ending injury, has brought a new maturity to Kyrgios. Or at least a sense of mortality.

“I know that the window that I have at the moment is extremely small,” he says.

“Just having my two feet in those stadiums, seeing all the crowd cheering and just those emotions, that’s what I took for granted earlier in my career, where now you might not have it happen again, because I know how quickly it can all be taken away with an injury.”

So, how long does he have left?

“I would say two more years, absolute max. But for me personally, I would love to just go out, play one more year, enjoy it, and go out on my own terms, not be forced [by] another surgery or another career-ending injury,” he says.

“I’m completely OK with this maybe being the last year of my career. You know, I never did want to play past 30 anyway. So it worked out well.”

News, results and expert analysis from the weekend of sport are sent every Monday. Sign up for our Sport newsletter.