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After Wimbledon heartbreak, Karolína Muchová will keep reaching out and touching tennis faith
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- After Wimbledon heartbreak, Karolína Muchová will keep reaching out and touching tennis faith
THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London — A year on from Amanda Anisimova's emotional speech after a 6-0, 6-0 Wimbledon final defeat to Iga Świątek , Karolína Muchová was similarly struggling to hold it together.
The tears flowed down her face on Saturday early evening, just as they had done for Anisimova a year earlier, as Muchová went up to do one of the toughest things in tennis: give a runners-up speech , having just suffered one of the biggest heartbreaks in the sport.
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This was nothing like the loss Anisimova had suffered, but it will be no less crushing — even if the emotions are different.
Muchová was beaten 6-2, 5-7, 6-3 by her friend and fellow Czech Linda Nosková , who overcame unraveling at her first sight of the finish line in the second set by resetting to win in three.
Between the second and third sets, the match had seemed there for the taking for Muchová. The 29-year-old had saved five championship points, winning five straight games, to come from 5-2 down against an opponent who was falling apart. When Muchová forced break point three times in the first game of the decider, a comeback win seemed inevitable.
Instead, Nosková fended them off and never looked back.
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"I'll start with Linda, my ex-friend," Muchová said at the start of her on-court interview, a killer line that bought her some time to try and gather herself as Centre Court dissolved into laughter. Muchová and Nosková played doubles together at the 2024 Paris Olympics, losing in the bronze medal match, and have been friends ever since.
Muchová did her best to remain composed but could do so no longer when the moment came to thank her team. "I'm sorry, it's emotional," she said. Muchová vowed to come back and fight for the Wimbledon trophy, which earned her more rapturous applause.
Muchová, a tennis player's tennis player who regularly earns plaudits from former stars for her game, entered the mainstream this past fortnight. Three straight wins over multiple Grand Slam champions Barbora Krejčíková, Naomi Osaka and Coco Gauff — the latter after saving a match point in one of the most dramatic matches in recent memory — introduced the world to her range of daring volleys, incredible court coverage and creative craft.
Her mainstream breakthrough came at a tournament that has not been kind to her. Muchová had lost in the first round for four years in a row before this edition, largely down to a pair of wrist injuries that had left her unable to hit topspin backhands for a time, including during her defeat to China's Wang Xinyu at the All England Club last year.
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Near misses have also been a recurring theme. In her previous Grand Slam final, at the French Open three years ago, Muchová also fell just short after somehow staying the momentum of a dominant opponent. That time it was Świątek, who led 6-2, 3-0 before Muchová came back to win the second set 7-5. She then went 2-0 up in the third, but Świątek, who was borderline unbeatable at Roland Garros at the time, gathered herself to win the final set 6-4.
Muchová also went seven years without a WTA Tour title between her first, in 2019, and her second, which arrived at the WTA 1000 Qatar Open, one rung below the Grand Slams, earlier this year. Ahead of Wimbledon, she won the Bad Homburg Tennis Open in Germany, beating Osaka in the final; Nosková also won a warm-up event on grass, the Berlin Tennis Open.
"I think she's someone that deserves more success (because) of how talented she is," Gauff said in her news conference after their semifinal.
Injuries have been a big contributing factor, but the context of those near misses makes Saturday's defeat to Nosková feel more painful, especially coming against a player eight years her junior. The best player not to have won a major is a moniker no one wants, but Muchová has to be in that conversation.
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Muchová was far from her best against Nosková. Her forehand, such a devastating weapon against Gauff and Osaka, malfunctioned badly — especially in the first set when she made 12 errors with it. She was similarly dominated in the second set, and only came back into it when Nosková started to tighten. How well Muchová started to play at that point only underlined how off her game she'd been for most of the rest of it.
"I think I started really slow today," a still devastated Muchová said in a news conference about an hour and a half after leaving Centre Court.
"I think today was one of my worst matches, I would say, from this tournament. I think I played better the other matches, definitely."
By the same token, she has come an incredible distance in a short space of time. Across two interviews at Wimbledon in 2024 and 2025, she reflected on the particular agonies of tennis when it comes to recovering from injuries. In 2024, she said that "tennis is a cruel sport," in the context of drawing Paula Badosa, another player who has been beset by injuries but has been as high as world No. 2, in the first round of only her second tournament back after wrist surgery.
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Last year, as she contemplated surgery on the other wrist, and tried to come to terms with a defeat in which she could only slice her backhand, Muchová, suffering with a bad sore throat, said: "I felt it's not that difficult, but then when I need that shot, when someone approached the net and I need to play fast and I cannot, then I'm like, 's–––, I need it now.'"
Following that wrist surgery in 2024, Muchová initially couldn't get out of bed or brush her teeth.
A couple of years on, with things clicking with new coach Sven Groeneveld, and a career-high ranking of No. 6 coming her way on Monday, she's in a far, far healthier position. If she can stay fit, then there's no reason she can't keep pushing to reach the sharp end of Slams.
But none of that was front of mind for Muchová on Saturday, when she fought back her tears as she thanked her team for putting up with her these last few weeks. Nor will it be when she thinks back to those three break points at 0-0 in the third set, and wonders whether on the third one she could have done more with one or two of the forehands she hit.
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"If I had one regret, I would say in the first game of the third set when I had advantage, I had the forehand when I wanted to go down the line and I hit it back cross, and then she smashed it," Muchová said.
"If I get that lead, 1-0, it would definitely feel different for me to start the set that way, but it didn't happen." Nosková called the game "the key point" of the match in her news conference and said the set would not have been the same had she lost it.
Muchová said she'd take a few days to get over the defeat, but that overall reaching the final was a great achievement. Whatever happens from here, Saturday was a reminder of the cruelty of a Grand Slam final — even if the flavor of the loss was entirely different from a year earlier.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic .
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