Kim Clijsters calls friendship on WTA Tour 'great' for women's sport

Former world number one Kim Clijsters believes that the friendship between players on the WTA Tour has been ‘great’. The 41-year-old remained a great servant of the sport and finished her career after winning as many as four Grand Slams.

Clijsters was recently quoted in a report about the changes on the WTA Tour. In the report, she discussed the friendships between players in detail. In the recent past, friendships between players on the tour have been normalized.

The most famous friendship between the two players, which always catches the eyes of the fans, is between world number one Aryna Sabalenka and Spain’s Paula Badosa. Both players faced off recently in the semifinal of the Australian Open where the Belarus’ star came out on top in straight sets. After the match, Sabalenka not only apologised to Badosa but also promised to buy her a present to ensure that the two stayed friends after the contest. She ended up buying a bracelet for the Spaniard.

Clijsters, in The Tennis Gazette report, stated that it is great for women’s tennis to have players' friendships on the tour. She also talked about her own time when the friendship between the players on the tour was not so common.

“I mean it is best friends but I don’t know, I see with my closer friends, I could never have that kind of relationship with an opponent because if my friend was on tour with me we would be together all the time,” she said. “We would be having dinners together! In tennis there is still a bit of separation where they all have their team and their boyfriends, so there is a bit of separation. I do think in the last few years the players have got a lot closer than what they were back in the day I think, maybe social media has something to do with it too.

She continued by saying: “I didn’t know much about my opponent’s private life back in the day, because it wasn’t out there. At the press conference you might pick up things here and there and I would know who was part of their teams, but you didn’t know where they went on vacation or who they were dating. Now you see it all out there on social media so it is different but I think it’s great. It’s great for women to be close to each other on tour and vent to each other. But at the same time it has to be weird to then compete against each other as well. But there were players back in the day you could play against and literally two minutes later in the locker room you could joke and talk about the match to each other. And then there were players you could potentially meet in the quarter finals and they wouldn’t even look at you any more. So everybody was different.”