Andrey Rublev gets real about depression and burnout during up-and-down season

Andrey Rublev opened up about some of the off-court struggles that have been affecting his performances during an up-and-down 2024 season, after claiming his second Top 5 win of the year over Jannik Sinner.

The 26-year-old had to do double duty on Saturday after rain in Montreal washed out the previous day’s play at the Omnium Banque National, and dispatched qualifier Brandon Nakashima 6-2, 6-2 before facing the world No. 1. Rublev, who had never defeated Sinner in a completed match going into their quarterfinal, recorded a 6-3, 1-6, 6-2 victory to stun the top seed.

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"I feel great and I'm happy to have won both matches today,” Rublev said in post-match press. “For me it’s a special moment because I was struggling for many months. So I guess, I need that match to feel that I’m playing well, that I’m able to show good results.”

...In life I was able to stay calm but inside the court I was burning everything.

Afterward, Rublev disclosed that a few of those “struggles” include burnout and depression—the latter of which he says has been a fight for “many years” that finally hit its boiling point this year.

“Mentally I was out of order,” he admitted. “I guess it was already a long moment of everything (building up) and I started to burn out, because I was struggling for many years with depression, with many things outside of the court… I guess this year it’s when I can’t handle it anymore, and it starts to just explode...

“It started to explode more and more on the court, because in life I was able to stay calm but inside the court I was burning everything.”

The Russian’s troubling on-court behavior has been generating the wrong kind of headlines for years, but hit a whole new intensity recently—from racquet-smashing meltdowns to being defaulted from a match for the first time in his career after lashing out against a line judge in Dubai. That incident was followed by an up-and-down stretch that saw Rublev lose four matches in a row, win his second Masters 1000 title in Madrid and then lose another four matches in a row.

Having made the decision to skip the Olympic Games in Paris as he didn’t feel ready mentally to compete, Rublev opted to take time off to “fix (his) head”—a process that included “one big talk” with countryman Marat Safin, who himself was known to be mercurial and emotional during his own successful career.

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Rublev's gamble is paying off in North America, with the No. 5 seed finally seeming to find his footing in Montreal as his peers made their sluggish returns from playing on the Olympic terre battue.

“I was struggling, now (in the) last months I feel really good, and straightaway the tennis is better,” Rublev explained.

A refreshed Rublev has now won eight of his last 10 matches, including his second career win over a world No. 1 against Sinner and, on Sunday, a comfortable 6-4, 6-2 victory over Matteo Arnaldi to reach the final.

The first player to reach more than one ATP Masters 1000 final this year, Rublev awaits the winner of Sebastian Korda and Alexei Popyrin.