Rohan Bopanna retires from tennis after a record-breaking, remarkable career

Rohan Bopanna has retired from tennis at the age of 45, announcing the end of a 20-year career that hit its greatest heights as it neared its end.

Bopanna, a legend of the doubles circuit and of India’s recent tennis history, said that the sport “has given me purpose when I was lost, strength when I was broken and belief when the world doubted me,” in a statement posted to social media.

In partnership with Matthew Ebden, he won the 2024 Australian Open men’s doubles title, becoming the oldest man to win a Grand Slam title in history and the oldest man to reach world No. 1 in doubles in the process. Bopanna also won the 2017 French Open mixed doubles title with Gabriela Dabrowski of Canada, and he reached four more Grand Slam finals. Bopanna represented India at the Davis Cup between 2002 and 2023, and competed for his country at three Olympic Games. He described representing India as the “greatest honour” of his life.

But beyond the titles, Bopanna’s tennis story — and especially his recent history — is defined by a combination of perseverance and kismet. He grew up in Coorg, in southern India, with a grandfather who owned a 50-acre coffee plantation and who didn’t want his son, MG Bopanna, traipsing around with nothing to do. So he made an unusual request: build a tennis court. MG knew nothing of the sport. So he learned it, and he built it, and that led to Rohan growing up playing it.

With no other kids for competition and no coach, he did strength training and got better, but not good enough for an academy, except one in Pune, 600 miles away, that would let him in if he paid his own way. So he did, and then bounced around the minor leagues of singles while figuring out that doubles might be his calling. He partnered with Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi of Pakistan, a controversial move for both considering the two countries’ history of antipathy, and they reached the U.S. Open final together in 2010. He was on his way.

Ten years later in 2020, having just turned 40 in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, Bopanna’s knee cartilage was shot and he was almost certain that his career was over.

One of the game’s doubles greats was at home in India, hitting a ball against a wall to maintain some semblance of feel, just in case science created the twin miracles that would make the pandemic and the pain go away. After trying numerous medical interventions, he was desperate. With a question that was not particularly serious, he asked a relative, a yoga teacher, if she could help.

What happened next changed his tennis life and turned into one of the great late-career surges in any sport.

His relative recommended Iyengar yoga, a discipline that focuses on alignment. He went to a studio, fortuitously located just down the road from his house in Bangalore. Over the next months, Mohan and Jaya Polamarasetty, who run the Practice Room, contorted Bopanna upside and down and strapped him into uncomfortable positions. When professional tennis returned, Bopanna traveled to tournaments with straps and weights, enabling him to continue the routines that the Polamarasettys taught him and which let the pain in his knees dissipate.

Then came the next piece of kismet. Ebden, a top Australian doubles player, split with his partner at the same time that Bopanna did with his. It was late 2022. By January 2024, under the floodlights in Melbourne, Bopanna was grinning into a camera with his daughter Tridha and his wife Supriya Annaiah, on top of the world. In 2020, Bopanna had feared that he might never hit a tennis ball with his child. Instead, she joined him on one of the sport’s biggest stages, her father a champion.

He described Supriya as his “greatest partner off court” in his retirement statement, and thanked Tridha for giving him “new purpose and a softer strength.”

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