Everyone thought Naomi Osaka's best days were behind her, she has other ideas

Most entries in this series follow a familiar shape: a rise, a peak, an injury or a personal crisis, and then a slow fade that never quite reverses. Naomi Osaka's career fits the first half of that shape perfectly. Four Grand Slam titles between 2018 and 2021, a No. 1 ranking, a very public mental health break, and then motherhood — the kind of sequence that, for most players, marks the quiet beginning of the end.

Except Osaka's story hasn't ended, and it isn't fading either. She reached a US Open semifinal last year and a maiden Wimbledon quarterfinal this year, results that belong to a player still very much building something rather than one coasting on reputation.

Her 2026 US Open ended in the fourth round against Elena Rybakina, the eventual world No. 1, and Osaka's reaction afterward said more about where her career actually stands than the scoreline did: she's no longer sure another Grand Slam title would even change her life.

That's not resignation. It's something rarer in professional sport — a genuine redefinition of what a comeback is supposed to accomplish, arriving from a player with more claim than almost anyone to simply chase the number back to five.

Osaka's rise was about as fast and clean as tennis produces. She won her first WTA title at Indian Wells in 2018, then beat Serena Williams in a chaotic, controversial US Open final months later to claim her first major, becoming the first Japanese Grand Slam singles champion and, by January 2019, the first Asian player ever to reach world No. 1. She added the Australian Open that same month, beating Petra Kvitova in three sets.

A second US Open title followed in 2020, beating Victoria Azarenka from a set down in a tournament where she wore a different mask bearing the name of a Black victim of racial violence in every round — one of the more powerful crossovers of athlete activism and elite competition in recent memory. A fourth major arrived at the 2021 Australian Open, beating Jennifer Brady, making Osaka just the third player in the Open Era, alongside Roger Federer and Monica Seles, to win every one of her first four Grand Slam finals without a single loss.

Weeks after that fourth title, Osaka withdrew from the 2021 French Open after declining mandatory press conferences and revealing she had been dealing with anxiety and depression, sparking a global conversation about athlete mental health that extended well beyond tennis.

She skipped Wimbledon entirely and spent the following seasons searching for consistency, with a runner-up finish at the 2022 Miami Open — her first final since that last Australian Open title — standing out as the one genuine high point.

She played her final tournament before stepping away in September 2022, then announced a maternity break; her daughter, Shai, was born in July 2023. It's the kind of break, at that stage of a career already interrupted by a mental health crisis, that ends plenty of careers outright rather than pausing them.

Osaka returned in January 2024 after 15 months away, initially working with Wim Fissette, the coach who had guided her to two Grand Slam titles. Their reunion, however, lasted only until September. Fissette had already left Qinwen Zheng in 2023 to return to Osaka's team for her comeback, a decision that caused considerable frustration for the Chinese player. Zheng said she cried when Fissette told her he was leaving and accused him of breaking his contract, calling the decision “very immoral.”

Osaka then moved on to Patrick Mouratoglou, beginning another chapter of her comeback in September 2024. The partnership lasted less than a year before they split in July 2025, after which Osaka began working with Tomasz Wiktorowski, Iga Swiatek's former coach. The changes reflected how unsettled the early stages of Osaka's return remained as she tried to rediscover her level after maternity leave.

Her first full season back produced the modest results of a rebuilding year. Osaka reached the quarterfinals in Doha and 's-Hertogenbosch and the fourth round in Rome and Beijing, but struggled to reproduce the level that had made her a four-time Grand Slam champion. In 2025, however, the comeback began to look more substantial as she reached her first WTA final since returning in Auckland and then the Montreal final.

The breakthrough came at the US Open, where Osaka beat Coco Gauff and Karolina Muchova back-to-back to reach her first Grand Slam semifinal since winning the 2021 Australian Open. The run also returned her to the world's top 20 for the first time since January 2022, suggesting that her comeback was becoming more than simply a return to competition.

This season has produced results that are historic for Osaka specifically, even without a return to a Grand Slam final. She reached the fourth round of the French Open for the first time in her career, on a surface that had never suited her game particularly well, and then made her first-ever Wimbledon quarterfinal, highlighted by a straight-sets win over world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka.

Her US Open ended earlier this year than last, a fourth-round loss to Rybakina, but even that defeat came against the player who left New York as the new world No. 1.

There's a version of this season a five-time major champion might describe as underwhelming. For a 27-year-old who spent 15 months away from the sport rebuilding a body and a career from scratch, breaking new ground at two majors that had never been her strongest is a genuinely different kind of achievement — proof of a more complete, more versatile player than the one who won four hard-court-heavy titles the first time around.

What makes Osaka's story stand apart from a typical career revival is how openly she's described the shift in what actually matters to her now.

Asked after the Rybakina loss how it felt to go five years without a major, she said it felt both long and short at once—"I had a kid, you know? There's a lot that happened in that time," and made clear that winning another Grand Slam isn't something weighing on her.

She's spoken before about wanting to show her daughter that she's capable of anything, framing her return less as a chase for a fifth title and more as a demonstration for someone who wasn't even born the last time she held one.

That's the real reason this isn't a graveyard story, despite the ranking dips, the missed years, and the very real possibility that a fifth Grand Slam title never arrives. Osaka isn't fading quietly or clinging to a version of success that's slipped out of reach. She's built an entirely new career, on her own terms, out of the wreckage a lot of people assumed was permanent — and by her own account, she's not particularly interested in being measured against the player she used to be.