Australia's Destanee Aiava says she will retire from professional tennis at the close of the 2026 season, and the one-time teenager prodigy is taking no prisoners as she gets set for her last goodbye.
Aiava, now 25, wrote a scathing open letter to tennis on social media this week in announcing that this season will be her last. The slammed what she said is a “racist, misogynistic, homophobic and hostile” culture within the sport, and questioned whether the sacrifices she made to become a professional athlete were indeed worth it.
Aiava reached a career-high ranking of No. 147 as a 17-year-old in 2017, where she became the first player born after the year 2000 to win a WTA main-draw match when she beat Bethanie Mattek-Sands at that year's Brisbane International. It was a career-altering step into the spotlight, she said, and not for the better. She confessed that she was "unprepared and dangerously naive to the consequences of trusting the wrong people.
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"Sometimes I kept playing because I felt like I owed it to not only myself but to everyone who had helped me throughout my career, to try and get back to where (on paper) I belonged," she wrote. "Other times I kept going because I was too scared to start again. Or I was bored. I also didn't know who I was outside of tennis and what my true passion was. I was constantly looking for that thing that gave me peace instead of grief. In other words, tennis was my toxic boyfriend. "