WIMBLEDON -- Australian Open champion Aryna Sabalenka has stated that she is "not 100 percent fit" ahead of Wimbledon, and that she is struggling to manage the shoulder injury that forced her to retire from her Berlin quarterfinal against Anna Kalinskaya last week.
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"It's teres major," No.3 seed Sabalenka said, describing the nature of her injury. "I call it just shoulder injury. It's really a specific injury, and it's really a rare one. Probably I'm just the second or the third tennis player who injured that muscle. [It's] a very frustrating one. The most annoying thing is that I can do anything. I can practice, I can hit my groundstrokes. I'm struggling with serving. That's really annoying.
"You don't feel like you're injured. If you give me some weights, I'm going to go lift some weights. But if you tell me to serve, I'm going to go through pain. We did an MRI, we did everything. We did a lot of rehab, a lot of treatments."
Sabalenka said that she and her team are doing "everything we can" to make sure she can play her first-round match against Emina Bektas on Monday. However, asked whether there was a chance she might not take to the court, she responded: "There is always a chance, yeah."
Last week marked the first time in Sabalenka's professional career that she has retired mid-match, which has added to her difficulties.
"That's really frustrating," she said. "I never deal with serious injuries in my career. The struggles I'm going through right now, that's a lot. I would say that the past month [has been] really challenging for me. I've been fighting through a lot of different pains.
"That's really tough to manage, this trying to stay positive and at the same time seeing the reality."
Nonetheless, for now Sabalenka is keeping her optimism. She was all smiles in her No.1 Court practise with good friend Ons Jabeur, and said that she was consciously trying to keep some fun in her life.
"I still have my hopes," she said. "As someone who been fighting through a lot of different pains in the past months, I still have my hopes."
