“My mind couldn’t take it anymore”: Former US Open champion reveals how mental health ended her career at 26

Former world No. 3 Gabriela Sabatini enjoyed a remarkable breakthrough on tour in the late 1980s, when at just 15 years old she reached her first Grand Slam semifinals at Roland Garros. The Argentine burst onto the world stage while still a teenager, and by the age of 18 she had already won 12 titles and reached another 21 finals.

The South American quickly became one of the leading names on the tour at a very young age. By 18, she had already captured a WTA Finals title, reached a Grand Slam final at the 1988 US Open (losing to Steffi Graf), and claimed several WTA 1000 titles, including Miami, Rome, and the Canadian Open.

Sabatini enjoyed an outstanding career, reaching her peak with the 1990 US Open title at just 20 years old. She went on to reach three more Grand Slam finals and won a total of 27 titles — 13 of them at WTA 1000 level, in addition to two WTA Finals trophies.

She finished 10 consecutive seasons inside the Top 10 — six of them in the Top 5 — and ended her career in 1996 at just 26 years old. "You feel like you fall into a slump and say, ‘I don’t want to play, I don’t want to be in here,’ and everything feels the same, and I wasn’t motivated to be there.”

“My mind couldn’t take it anymore. At 26, physically I was in great shape,” the Argentine said on the YouTube channel of former Argentine rugby player Agustín Creevy. “I had already been processing it. I think it started maybe in 1994, about two years earlier. That’s when I began working with a sports psychologist, someone I had already worked with, to understand what was happening to me.

The former world No. 3 was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2006, honoring a remarkable career that ended prematurely. Sabatini is also the player who never reached world No. 1 but recorded the most wins against reigning No. 1 players in the Open Era, with a total of 10 victories.

The Argentine spoke about how mental health began to affect her career from its very early stages, when she was still a teenager. “This happened to me when I was 17. I felt like I didn’t want to play tennis anymore. I didn’t want to do this anymore. It passed, I reconnected, I got excited again, and then the same thing happened once more,” she admitted.

“So I said, ‘Could this be happening again?’ and that’s when I started working with the psychologist. That’s when I realized it was the end. I don’t know if it’s tennis or sport itself — I think it’s everything around it that leads you there: learning how to handle fame, the press, the demands, the expectations. You don’t notice it, but there comes a point when all of that starts to burn your mind.”

Sabatini acknowledged that it took her years to reconnect with tennis, something she only managed after retiring. “I played an exhibition match when I was older and I enjoyed the game again. It was like being a little girl playing tennis again. That’s how I felt when I was 13 or 14, and then it turns into a job and everything that comes with it: pressure, demands. You keep going, and going, and going, until one moment I said enough — I can’t continue. I’m starting to hate tennis, and I didn’t want that to happen because it gave me so much and something so beautiful. So I respected what I was feeling.”