Sabine Lisicki says a misdiagnosis of a left ankle injury forced her to miss much more time than she should have. The 21-year-old German, who reached the Wimbledon semifinals for the first time with a 6-4, 6-7 (4), 6-1 over Marion Bartoli, first suffered a left ankle injury at the 2009 U.S. Open, where she had to be carried off on a stretcher, and then suffered an unrelated one at Indian Wells in 2010. She played the next week in Miami but was forced off the tour for the rest of the spring and summer, and didn't rediscover her Top-25 game until last month. It is unclear what the original diagnosis was, but she ended up with a fracture. Lisicki, who reached the 2009 Wimbledon quarterfinals, needed a wild card to get into Wimbledon.
"It was a bad diagnosis because it cost me a lot of time," she told reporters. "So I went to the German doctors much later. I should have done that earlier. I know that for the future I'll be going on the first plane back to Germany to see my doctors if I have something. It was tough, but it happened. Nothing I can change. I was fighting to get back, working very, very hard...After a normal ankle sprain it usually takes six weeks, so I was out for five months."