Former No.2 Badosa declares herself injury-free, ready to start in Adelaide

Paula Badosa is injury-free and ready to kick off her season next week at the Adelaide International.

The 26-year-old Spaniard, who reached a career-high No.2 in 2022, suffered a stress fracture in her back and sat on the sidelines for the latter half of the 2023 season. Now ranked No.68, Badosa is ready to climb back up the rankings.

"I've never been more excited to come back to start the year," Badosa told reporters on Media Day in Adelaide, where she is set to face a qualifier in the first round. It will be her first match since retiring to Marta Kostyuk in the second round at Wimbledon.

"I want to get back to that level as soon as possible. I know it's going to be tough at the beginning. It's been a lot of months that I didn't play."

Badosa fought off officially shutting down her season, but she finally succumbed to the reality of the situation ahead of the US Open in August. Now confined to her couch, she could do little more than wait for the injury to heal. To say the experience taught her patience would be a slight overstatement. The 2021 Indian Wells champion said she simply didn't have a choice.

"It's an injury that you don't have much under your control," Badosa said, "because at the beginning I thought, oh, I do more hours of treatment, I do more hours of this or that and I'm going to heal faster. Then I learned that just having patience, try to let it heal on its own.

"But honestly it's a very slow -- I was going to say a bad word -- but yeah, very slow process."

Two steps forward and one step back. That was Badosa's healing process. Just when she would be able to hit the courts for a couple of days, the pain would return. But she's happy to say she's been pain-free for the last month.

"It was a very tough process, especially mentally for me to accept all this," she said. "As I always say, I love to play tennis. I love to compete. 

"So all of a sudden one day I had to stop completely and started to have like a normal life -- not even a normal life. I had to stay on the couch. so imagine how boring was that."

Badosa felt like a fish out of water without tennis but used the time to reconnect with her friends and family. But, he says, nothing could replace the feeling of competition. 

"I think now maybe I will value a little bit more now being in every tournament, every match, every draw. I'm really excited to be here again."