Kolb: “I play for moments when there is a reason to unfurl the Ukrainian flag”

Ukrainian tennis player Hope Kolb He emotionally commented on the first singles final in ITF tournaments:

“15,000 finals in singles in Spain. 29 years. A trifle for many, but not for a simple girl from Evpatoria, who completed her professional career 5 years ago along with education. Few people will understand what it’s like to play tennis in Evpatoria, when your parents were simple builders and pharmacists and you accidentally started playing tennis. If you do not know such a surface until the age of 15, you meet only at the final tournaments in Dnipro. When as a kid you trained in sanatorium halls with no races and icicles on batteries. When the ball is “bald”, but it bounces, everything is fine, you can play.

At the age of 14, when you became the first master of tennis in Evpatoria history and it was a total vacation for the city (but in 2014 they sacrificed you as a person for staying loyal to your country). When you’re 10 years old, they buy you a 310 gram racket like Safin’s and you play with it for a month, until it still floats out of your hand on the concrete. From the age of 13, when your only coach is your father, who has never played in his life (exception is 8 months when I train in Kharkov and 3 years in Lviv, where Vera Ivanovna always trains), when your sparring partners are 4 years younger sister and Brothers 8, 15 and 19 years younger. When everyone laughs at your crooked technique, but you feel good with the ball, because all your training is to be able to return the ball well and comfortably for Marina, Maxim, Stas, Ilya.

When you finish school well, you get 2 degrees of training and sometimes you just don’t stop showing your worst tennis. When you have a big family and Sasha comes first. When you don’t have more than 2 rackets in your life Two of them now (only now they are different too, they have been since 2017). When you play five weeks in a row with a stretch and the strings are still solid (which is 19! singles, 5 of them with WTA players 180-500 + 11 doubles + sometimes pre-match warm-up, three times in 5 weeks, movement from clay to hard and back) . Not because you played with the tape for the first time 3 days ago and you didn’t have any previous injuries.

When they come to Latvia with a backpack, volunteers give you their sportswear and you buy a few more tennis jerseys at a second-hand store in Riga. You can go on for a very long time … The better you play and the further you go, the more “experts” write why you should play if you are a “trash can” and also old. You lose in the qualifiers and no one cares about you, but as soon as you increase your win rate to positive, you immediately become “nothing”.

Yes, I will play some more. I play for moments when you have a reason to unfurl the Ukrainian flag, to remind you of my country and my occupied city. I’ll play because I don’t care, as long as there’s nowhere to turn. I will play because now I have the opportunity to be with my relatives in different countries and talk about the war and the Crimea. I will play because today only 300 people applauded Ukraine’s flag and anthem, children took pictures with our flag and adults expressed their support for my country!

I did not win the final. Of course I am offended and sorry. But this particular post is not about tennis at all. I was exactly where I needed to be today!

Thanks to our heroes for the good news on the front. My sincere condolences to the families of the victims… and to those who suffer daily from bombardment… Victory to Ukraine!

Note that previously, 29-year-old Nadezhda Kolb reached the singles final for the first time.