Australian tennis player Nick Kyrgios has said he hopes to pull the curtain down on his tennis career “a little bit more gracefully” than Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray were able to.
The Brit retired from the sport this summer at the Paris Olympics but had come close to leaving the sport in 2019 on the back of a hip injury that saw him undergo multiple major surgeries. Since 2019, he didn’t make it past the third-round of a Grand Slam while his last Grand Slam triumph came in 2016.
Like Murray, the tail-end of Nadal’s career has been ridden by injury. The Spaniard is set to retire next month at the Davis Cup in Malaga and in the video announcing his retirement, he referenced the difficulties he’s faced with injuries in the last couple of years as a key factor behind his decision.
The 22-time Grand Slam champion used numbing injections to get through the 2022 French Open and has also faced struggles with abdominal injuries.
Kyrgios, who hasn’t played competitively since 2023, said he hopes his exit is smoother.
“I look at how Andy Murray’s doing it now, and how Rafael [Nadal] is going out, I don’t want to be like that either. I don’t want to be kind of crawling to the finish line in a sense,” Kyrgios said on The Louis Theroux podcast.
“What Andy Murray’s achieved in this sport is second to basically no-one … unless you are Novak [Djokovic], [Roger] Federer, or Nadal, like, the next person is Andy Murray.
“It’s like you’ve achieved everything. You deserve to go out, I think, a little bit more gracefully than he’s done.
“I think that the surgeries, the pain, it’s just not worth it, in my opinion.”