How Dominic Thiem accepted retirement at 31: "I knew that slowly, my tennis career is coming to an end"

VIENNA—At the age of 20 or so, Dominic Thiem decided there was only one place he wanted to hang up his racquet when time came calling.

Standing inside the Wiener Stadthalle in Vienna, the moment for Thiem to write the final chapter in a novel’s worth of remarkable stories authored on the tennis court has arrived. The 31-year-old shares an extraordinary bond with the Erste Bank Open, for it was here where Thiem took in his first tennis match as a wide-eyed preschooler and joined the event’s honor roll of champions more than two decades later.

“I knew that if my body lets me, I'm going to finish in Vienna,” the 2019 title holder tells me during a catchup a few days earlier. “That was always my dream and my goal. I didn't know which year it's going to be, but it's 2024. It’s a very nice coincidence that it's the 50th birthday of the tournament as well.”

Over the past few years, a right wrist injury denied Thiem the chance to build off his maiden major triumph at the 2020 US Open. The starts and stops brought on by that hampering issue further opened the door for Thiem to look into a future without tennis at the forefront after initially exploring outside possibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the former world No. 3 gave more of himself to new passions, it created “a distance” from his life as a world-class athlete.

“I think it helped that I took the decision already in March and that I had the time to prepare,” Thiem says. “The last two years or so, I saw that I'm not going to be able to come back to the ranking and to the playing level I once had. I knew that slowly, my tennis career is coming to an end. I needed to look for new ways because there's going to be life after tennis.”

Tennis has been the constant in Thiem’s life up until this point. Among the sport’s aspects he appreciates most is way tennis asks a player to look inward. To stare down the challenge across the net and work through resolutions for overcoming it.

“You start from a very early age to win and to lose alone. To solve solutions only by yourself,” describes Thiem. “You get just really little help by your team in the match. But mostly, you really have to solve the problems alone. The one side is the best thing ever. If you won a close match or if you won a big title, you know that the main part was you. That's just unbelievable feeling.

“There are so many ups and downs in a match, just like in life. You cannot avoid to do mistakes. You learn from those during a match and also in life.”

To read our entire feature story on Dominic Thiem, click here.