Victoria Azarenka at 34: ‘You say I can’t? Well, watch me.’

How did Victoria Azarenka feel about the long delay in the first set of her quarterfinal with Yulia Putintseva on Tuesday in Miami? No one needed to ask her twice, including chair umpire Marija Cicak.

“Absolute ridiculousness,” Azarenka said to Cicak as she stalked off the court, leaving tournament officials to fix a power outage in the stadium court.

That the 34-year-old Azarenka would be brought to a boil over a situation like this is hardly surprising. Even in the best of times on court, she keeps herself at a low simmer. On Tuesday, we got the full Vika range of emotions.

Early on, she reminded the ball kids that she wants the balls thrown to her from a certain side of the court when she’s serving. When they moved too slowly for her liking, she flicked her racquet impatiently to try to hurry them along. Later, as unforced errors began to fly off her racquet, Azarenka banged on her head with her hand and screamed, “Dumb [expletive deleted] decision!”

Then, just when the match appeared to be slipping away early in the third set, she showed us why her vehemence can be so useful. Desperate to stop her slide, Vika began saying “Come on, come on, come on!” to herself, three times fast, and punctuating each phrase with a fist-pump. That hardly sounds like a novel motivational technique, but it worked; she began to slow down and narrow her focus to each individual point—just what the sports psychologists are always telling us to do. From there, the errors stopped flowing, Azarenka won five of the next six games and the match to put herself into her fifth Miami semifinal.

“My reaction was not the best,” Azarenka confessed when she was asked about the delay. “No one knows what’s happening. I think that was probably the most confusing part.”

But she gave herself credit for her proactive approach to turning the momentum back in her favor.

“I need to reset, and I really need to see what I can do rather than trying to adjust to her game,” she told herself.

“I think that was good, the way I came out in that third set was very decisive.”

Azarenka first made it this far in Miami—Key Biscayne back then—in 2009, as a 19-year-old, when she beat Serena Williams for the title. She won the tournament again in 2011, and again in 2016, when returned from a long injury layoff to complete a startling Sunshine Double.

Now it’s 2024, and Azarenka is back yet again, with a backstory that few of her fellow players can match. She won two major titles, in Melbourne, in 2011 and 2012, and spent 51 weeks at No. 1. She had a son, Leo, in 2016, and won a long custody battle for him that kept her off the tour for nearly a season. It has been eight years since was ranked in the Top 5, and in that time she’s won just won title. She’s ranked 32nd at the moment.

Azarenka admits that finding a source of inspiration at this stage of her life isn’t easy.

“One of my top motivations was to prove people wrong,” she said of her younger self. “‘You say I can’t? Well, watch me.’”

Over the years, she proved herself sufficiently, to the point where “that motivation was not a priority for me” anymore.

“So I needed to find what it is if I don’t need to prove people wrong. That’s been, I wouldn’t say a challenge, but it’s definitely been a learning process.”

She says she has started to find that “space” this season.

“I am hungry, and my hunger comes from that I want to learn more and I’m trying new things.”

One of my top motivations was to prove people wrong. ‘You say I can’t? Well, watch me.’ Victoria Azarenka

Unlike most 34-year-old players of the past, Vika has role models. Fellow moms like Caroline Wozniacki and Angelique Kerber; Andy Murray, another former No. 1 who battles on, even with a much lower ranking; and of course, Novak Djokovic, who Azarenka says “looks like he’s 19 years old.”

“That feeling of, ‘I still have potential, I can still improve,’” is what Azarenka looks for, and continues to find.

“If I don’t,” she says, “you won’t see me anymore.”