Australian Open: How Garbine Muguruza climbed back to her peak

Garbine Muguruza’s career was falling off the proverbial African cliff when she decided to climb Mt Kilimanjaro.

Spanish tennis player Garbine Muguruza during her climb up Mt Kilimanjaro. Picture: Instagram

Cue every AFL coach, every AFLW coach, every NRL coach, every NRLW coach, every BBL coach, every WBBL coach, every NBL coach, every WNBL coach, every A-League coach, every W-League coach, every Olympic coach and every life coach in the country booking a trek to Mt Kilimanjaro for athletes who need to be lifted from a slump so paralysing and long-lasting it resembles a coma.

Garbine Muguruza’s career was falling off the proverbial African cliff when she decided to ditch a professional tennis player’s normal holiday of dream beach on dream island with dream water and dream hotel to stir up anything that was still left of her fighter’s soul. In tennis. In life.

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She was pampered and comfortable and she knew it. She had won Wimbledon and the French Open. She had been the world number one but she had cartwheeled so far from the peak she could barely see it. When she got to the Australian Open, she already knew she would be unseeded. No matter how disoriented she got on her way up Kilimanjaro, no matter how much she hallucinated, no matter how decent the view was from up there, she could not have seen herself in Saturday night’s final without a doctor diagnosing that she had lost her mind.

Muguruza is strangely coy about the five-day expedition to the highest mountain peak in Africa. There’s been mentions of sheer cliff drops – there’s my career! – and sub-zero-temperatures and 22 hours of hiking in one day but she shies away from a chapter-and-verse account. Perhaps the challenge and impact has been so deep-and-meaningful she wants to keep it private.

She wrote on social media at the time, in November: “We crossed waterfalls, rivers, icy rivers, caves, cliffs, and the hardest: frozen nights. At some point, I was crying when my guide told me to not look down at the 300m free fall.”

The WTA website says: “On the fifth day, Muguruza and the party woke up ‘very, very early’ in order to reach the summit at Uhuru Peak, which sits at an altitude of 19,341 feet (5895 metres). But with temperatures dropping down to -12º C, there was no time to stop for rest or sleep. They hiked for 16 hours straight back down to Camp 1 — for a total of 22 brutal hours of hiking on that final day.” Afterwards, Muguruza wrote on Instagram: “We felt ALIVE! Thanks to my expedition and my guide. Special thank you to my guide for keeping me awake when I collapsed at the glacier.”

Here’s the final no one saw coming, including the people in it. Muguruza versus Sofia Kenin. If it feels like the first round of the China Open, you’re not mistaken. It was the first round of last year’s China Open, won by Kenin in three sets. It’s the final no one wanted, if we’re being honest. The final between players we do not have a connection to.

Where’s Ash Barty and the niece she appears to have kidnapped? Where’s Serena? Watching Muguruza and Kenin will be like listening to a conversation between two virtual strangers. It’s not as bad as it sounds. You do not need to know an athlete or feel an attachment to be swept up in an occasion.

Look at their barely recognisable faces. They may not mean a lot to us, but the Open means a hell of a lot to them. They will be intense and fiercely determined. They will scratch and claw. All these emotions and attitudes are contagious if you let them be. Wonderful.

Muguruza was the world No 3 at the 2018 French Open. She reached the semi-finals before her career fell from a great height. Her next six majors stopped twice in the first round, twice in the second round and twice in the fourth round. She finished last year as the world No 36. She took exception to her decline being called a coma, and fair enough, too, but at the very least she had fallen into a deep sleep.

“Hmm, I think a ‘coma’ is a pretty strong comment,” she told a suitably chastised reporter. “I would say I think those years were less successful if you compare them to my previous years. That’s how I see it. I don’t see it at all as a coma.

“I just think you struggle as a player, and there are moments where things don’t go your way. I came here still not feeling great. I wasn’t really thinking, ‘How far will I go?’ I had enough trouble thinking, ‘How will I go practice today?’

“I took every day at a time. Like that. Each day I was gaining a better feeling instead of getting frustrated and thinking in the future. You just have to be patient and go through the rough moments, just hang in there and it will come back again.

“The toughest moment is when you work hard, work like before, or even harder, and you don’t feel like results are coming fast. So I think that’s the tricky part of us. Athletes sometimes can get a little bit desperate, get too impatient about it.”

If Latrell Mitchell slackens off at South Sydney, send him up Kilimanjaro. If Alyssa Healy’s runs dry up, give her five days on Kilimanjaro. If Dusty Martin loses his way, or Cate Campbell, or Sam Kerr, Kilimanjaro.

On her own experience, Muguruza said: “It definitely was a life-changing experience. I cannot give a simple answer to such a complicated question because it’s not the right moment to talk about it. But it definitely had an impact on me, not as a tennis player, but just in general. Being through such a tough challenge, it did many things inside of me.”