announced earlier this month that she\u2019ll retire from tennis after the US Open<\/strong><\/a>, following a brief return to the Hologic WTA Tour this year after the 2024 birth of her son Petr. A wild card for her 16th Wimbledon appearance this year, the 35-year-old left-hander led Navarro — who reached the quarterfinals in 2024 — by a break in the first set at 3-1, but lost 11 of the last 12 games to drop the curtain on her career at the tournament she won in 2011 and 2014.<\/p>\nAfter the defeat, which lasted exactly 1 hour, Kvitova spoke from the heart to the fans. She said that while she “wish[ed] they could’ve played a little bit longer,” she enjoyed a “beautiful atmosphere” on No. 1 Court.<\/p>\n
“To have another chance to player here one more time, it means a lot to me,” Kvitova said. “This place holds the best memories I could wish for. I never dreamed of winning a Wimbledon, and I won it twice, so this is something very, very special.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I will miss Wimbledon for sure. I will miss tennis, I will miss the fans, but I’m ready for the next chapter in life as well.”<\/p>\n
Kvitova ends her Wimbledon career with a 38-14 record in main-draw matches at the tournament. Her victories, and total matches, at the event leads active players.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Navarro, who beat Naomi Osaka and Coco Gauff on her way to her first Grand Slam quarterfinal at Wimbledon last year — which she then bettered with a run to the semifinals of the US Open — will face either Veronika Kudermetova or Zhu Lin in the second round. A potential third-round match with No. 17 seed and defending champion Barbora Krejcikova could await the American in the third round, with No. 7 seed Mirra Andreeva also still alive in a third quarter of the draw that lost No. 3 seed Jessica Pegula earlier on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
More to come…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two-time champion Petra Kvitova played the final Wimbledon match of her career on Tuesday at the All England…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":30617,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[62,1464,4063,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-30616","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-text","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114779573683248075","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}