The Long Way Back: Barbora Krejcikova Finds Her Old Self Again

Bob Stockton

For a player who has won a Wimbledon title and a French Open crown, the inaugural WTA 250 in Athens might have looked, on paper, like a modest stop on the calendar. For Barbora Krejcikova, it was something closer to a homecoming with herself.

On Sunday, the Czech fought back from a break down in both sets to beat home favorite Maria Sakkari 7-6(5), 6-3, claiming the first WTA title of the new event and, more importantly, her first tour-level trophy since she lifted the Venus Rosewater Dish at Wimbledon in the summer of 2024. It was the ninth WTA singles title of her career — and by her own account, one that felt entirely unlike the other eight.

“It’s great,” Krejcikova told reporters afterward. “It’s something very special and incredible, and it’s a unique experience, because I didn’t feel like this for such a long period. I’m just very happy, and I’m going to enjoy every moment now.”

A Career Interrupted

To understand why a WTA 250 title carried so much weight, it helps to remember how far Krejcikova has had to travel just to get back on court. A back injury sidelined her for the first five months of 2025, wiping out the start of a season that should have followed her career-best run — a second consecutive year-end top-10 finish in 2024, built on that Wimbledon triumph over Jasmine Paolini and a quarterfinal run at the Australian Open. Instead, she didn’t make her 2025 season debut until Strasbourg in May, and spent the rest of the year piecing her game back together, with quarterfinal finishes at Eastbourne, the US Open, and Seoul standing as the high points of an otherwise difficult stretch.

That is the context that makes Krejcikova’s career arc so distinctive in the first place. She is a player who has done almost everything a champion can do — a French Open singles title in 2021, a Wimbledon singles title in 2024, twenty tour-level doubles titles (most alongside longtime partner Katerina Siniakova), three Australian Open mixed doubles crowns, an Olympic gold medal in doubles — yet has had to build her career around slam-sized peaks separated by long, injury-forced valleys. Athens was a signal that another peak may be forming.

Spoiling a Fairytale, Finding a Rhythm

The final itself had its own storyline: Sakkari, a former world No. 3 also rebuilding after her own injury setbacks, was chasing a fairytale home title in front of a Greek crowd seeing the WTA Tour return to Athens for the first time since 1990. She broke early in both sets and had the crowd roaring behind her. Both times, Krejcikova simply refused to let the match slip away, clawing back the opening set in a tiebreak before winning six of the final eight games to close it out in one hour and 43 minutes.

That kind of resilience — falling behind, absorbing the pressure of a partisan crowd, and finding a way to seize the biggest points anyway — is precisely the quality that has defined Krejcikova’s two Grand Slam runs. It’s a mentality that can’t be manufactured overnight, and its reappearance in Athens is arguably more encouraging for her prospects than the trophy itself.

What It Means Going Forward

A WTA 250 title will not by itself vault Krejcikova back into the game’s elite, and she knows it. But titles are built out of matches, and matches are built out of the small, repeatable habits — problem-solving under pressure, trusting the body through a full week of competition, closing out tight sets — that injury layoffs are so good at eroding. Athens suggests those habits are coming back.

For a 30-year-old former world No. 2 with a Roland Garros trophy and a Wimbledon trophy already on her shelf, the question was never really about talent. It was about whether her body would let that talent show up consistently again. One title, on a hard court in a city the tour hadn’t visited in over three decades, is not proof of anything permanent. But for a player who spent much of the last two years searching for exactly this feeling, it’s a real and meaningful start — and, as she put it herself, one she intends to enjoy.