Japan’s Naomi Osaka Fell in Disheartening Match in Tokyo 2020 Ending the Olympics For Her

Naomi Osaka of Japan loses the battle

Wednesday, 28th July 2021

Tennis superstar Naomi Osaka’s Olympics stint this year came to a screeching halt as the athlete fell to Czech player Marketa Vondrousova in the third round of the postponed 2020 games’ women's tennis tournament.

The star player had been representing the host country, Japan, in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and expressed her chagrin at the straight set loss on Tuesday.

Osaka said, “I'm disappointed in every loss, but I feel like this one sucks more than the others.”

She added, “I'm not saying that I did bad right now, but I do know that my expectations were a lot higher.”

The “expectations” that were pinned on Osaka by her fans across the country and the globe, as she states, unnerved her and was “a bit much”.

Being a four-time Grand Slam champion as well as the highest-paid female athlete in the world, Osaka cited the pressure must have got to her. She is also the host country’s poster girl for the Games, all of which cumulatively was too much to handle, according to the player.

“I definitely feel like there was a lot of pressure for this,” Osaka said. “I think it’s maybe because I haven’t played in the Olympics before and for the first year (it) was a bit much.”

It was not all grey for the tennis star after all as the start to the Games will always hold fond memories for her. As she herself said last week when she did the honours of lighting the Olympis cauldron at the grand opening ceremony that this was, “undoubtedly the greatest athletic achievement and honor I will ever have in my life.”

This may give her little consolation to cope with the unforeseeable loss she faced of 6-1, 6-4 to former French Open finalist Marketa Vondrousova of the Czech Republic in the third round of the Olympic tennis tournament on Tuesday.

The World Number Two, Naomi Osaka was born in Japan and raised in the United States. On Tuesday’s match she was seen struggling with her usually reliable groundstrokes. Vondrousova on the other hand, produced a series of drop-shot winners along with several other clever shots that got the home player to come out of her comfort zone.

The left-handed Czech player said, “It’s tough for her also playing in Japan and in the Olympics, it’s so much pressure, I cannot imagine.”

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Source:

Indianexpress