What an unforgettably accursed end for Grigor Dimitrov at Wimbledon. His injury on Monday will haunt me not because of its visible gore, but its timing. Few players in men's tennis find themselves holding a 2-0 set lead over the top-ranked player in the world, Jannik Sinner, at a major tournament. In fact, it's been 17 months since anyone held such an advantage on Sinner, and he came back to win that one, anyway. But the No. 19 seed Dimitrov was in that rarefied position, fully in control of this fourth-round match, until he wasn't.
While serving at 1-2 in the third set, Dimitrov missed a low backhand volley and touched the right side of his chest. It looked innocuous enough. On the very next point he hit an ace to win the game, then sat down on the grass, clutching his chest, gasping, and repeating, "My pec."
Dimitrov was assessed by medical staff and briefly went off court for further evaluation, but soon returned to the court, in tears, to retire from the match. For a righty with a one-handed backhand, there's not much tennis to be played without a functional right pectoral muscle. (At time of writing, he had not yet disclosed any additional details on the injury.) Dimitrov struggled to lift his arm to shake hands with the umpire; Sinner helped carry out his bags.
Most retirements in tennis are undertaken by a player who is already down in the match, and has decided not to exacerbate an injury in the chase for an unlikely victory. Dimitrov was on course for a comfortable win over a man who does not lose tennis matches anymore, except to his rival Carlos Alcaraz. Afterward, Sinner expressed empathy for Dimitrov and said that he did not consider this a win. Sinner himself had taken painkillers after a hard fall in the very first game of the match, when he braced his landing with his right arm. He had been struggling to gain much traction in the match when it met its abrupt conclusion. (Sinner said he would be getting an MRI on Tuesday to determine the severity of his injury.)
Had Dimitrov completed the win, it would have been the apex of his late career, surpassing his upset of Alcaraz in his run to the Miami final in 2024, when he played so sublimely that Alcaraz said he'd felt like a 13-year-old on the court. With a win on Monday, Dimitrov also would have returned to the Wimbledon quarterfinals for the first time since 2014, when he was a hotshot bearing the impossible burden of a "Baby Fed" nickname. Eleven years later, he's a 34-year-old veteran with a stylish game defined by flexibility and hand skills, and though the technical and tactical parts of his tennis are as sharp as they've ever been, his body can be uncooperative. Dating back to Wimbledon last year, he has now retired from matches at five consecutive major tournaments, a record for any man in the Open era. Sinner acknowledged after the match how "unlucky" his friend Dimitrov had been with injuries as of late. The cameras even got a shot of Roger Federer looking on from the stands, ashen-faced, watching a former foe's Wimbledon end in the cruelest possible fashion.
"We're in the second week of Wimbledon. Let's have fun," Dimitrov had said in his press conference after his previous match, a straight-set victory over Sebastian Ofner. "Physically is probably the number one thing that I really need the most, and it's there right now. The rest is having fun.” He had played ingenious tennis to build his lead over Sinner, regularly ripping his first serve in the 130s, and using skittering slices to bait Sinner into gawky misses you rarely see from a ball-striker so inhumanly consistent. He had lost to Sinner four times in a row, with his sole victory occurring in 2020, when Sinner was just an 18-year-old.
Dimitrov was roughly one break of serve away from solving one of his most maddening matchups. Instead he leaves London with disappointment about what could have been, and yet another physical setback in a career increasingly defined by them. Grigor Dimitrov's Wimbledon run is over, and he disembarked at the furthest possible destination from "fun."
