Emma Raducanu made her first retirement of the season at the Korea Open in Seoul on Saturday. Suffering from pain in her left foot, she pulled out of her quarter-final against top seed Daria Kasatkina while trailing 6-1.
Raducanu had called the trainer to the court at the previous changeover but did not actually remove her shoes. After playing two more games in which her movement looked seriously compromised, she made the decision to stand down.
The same foot problem had surfaced in the previous round, where Raducanu found an excellent level against last year’s finalist Yue Yuan. On that occasion a visit from the trainer had seemed to improve matters. She continued without visible discomfort and even said after the match that “I trust my body a lot more now”.
Raducanu was given an extra day’s recovery time by the heavy rain and storms that wiped out any play on Friday, but it did not seem to help. From the beginning of Saturday’s match, she looked uncomfortable when she landed on her left foot as she came out of her service motion, and also lacked mobility on the baseline.
This was Raducanu’s seventh retirement in tour-level matches, four of which came during her injury-plagued first full season of 2022. Having played sparingly in 2024 to date, she had arranged a busier programme of events in Asia. But her participation in Beijing, the WTA 1000 tournament that begins next week, may now be in doubt.
“I always knew there was a really long block in Asia at the end of the year and I didn’t want to overdo myself in the first half of the year,” Raducanu said during a WTA interview earlier this summer.
“If you look at the tournaments I played it was relatively light. I skipped quite a few weeks over the clay knowing that I’m at the stage where I’m not trying to win every event on the clay, on the grass and hard [courts].
“I have to prioritise and Asia was one of those for me. So I stacked the year on the backend heavy, because I’m excited. I thrive in Asia. It’s where I truly feel like home.”