Boulter: 'My time will come - and I have to believe that'

The former British No 1's season has been up and down, but after a disruptive injury, she is moving in the right direction and still searching for her ‘moment’, she tells Flo Clifford

- By Flo Clifford

The rigours of the tennis tour wait for no one. Last month Katie Boulter was trying to string together a run on the grass. A second-round loss at Wimbledon brought an end to that, but there was no time to dwell on the defeat. That is not the 29-year-old's style.

Instead, it was pretty much straight back to work at the National Tennis Centre before landing in the heat and humidity of Washington - “a shock to the system” - with her focus firmly on the next half of the season: seven weeks in the US, a week at home, before jetting off again for another two-and-a-half-month stint in Asia.

The end of her 2024 season was “a mix” results-wise, she says, but it was significant that she maintained fitness throughout and finished on a high note, reaching the semifinals in Tokyo and the final of the WTA 250 tournament in Hong Kong.

“The season is very much nonstop,” Boulter tells The Independent. “No one ever gets a break. At the end of the season a lot of people start dropping like flies. I was able to push on and then finish my year really strong, which helped massively. Mentally, it was a milestone for me, because I managed to push through a lot of tough, tough moments out there.”

Boulter’s career has involved a lot of pushing through tough moments, from a chronic fatigue syndrome diagnosis as a teenager to a series of injury issues as she became a more established player, including a spinal stress fracture in 2019.

That seemed behind her as she became a more consistent force on the tour. In 2023 and 2024, she hit a series of milestones: becoming British No 1, winning her first WTA title in Nottingham, and breaking into the world’s top 25 with her run to the Hong Kong Open final last autumn.