Eugenie Bouchard was forced to end her first tennis tournament of the 2024 season in a really unlucky way, as she retired from her quarter-final match.
The Canadian already played professional tournaments in 2024, but they were not tennis tournaments but pickleball tournaments, as she switched to being a pickleball professional.
Still, she played plenty of exhibition matches, and she has even decided to enter one WTA tournament, which was her first of the 2024 season, even though it was an event of a W75 category in Zephyrhills, Florida, United States.
In the first round of the tournament, Bouchard outplayed the sixth-seeded Justina Mikulskyte from Lithuania, beating the Lithuanian 6-1, 6-2 in only an hour and 28 minutes of play.
After that, the 2014 Wimbledon finalist took on Fanny Stollar, and even though this time around she needed three sets, she still made it through, winning 6-1, 2-6, 6-4 in two hours and five minutes.
In the quarter-finals of the tournament, she took on the tournament's top seed, Kayla Day. The match was a proper battle with both players having their chances in the first and second sets.
In the opening set, Day led by a break twice, but she wasn't able to keep her advantage, the set reached the tie-break, and the experienced Canadian was better in that, winning it 7-4 to take the first set.
Bouchard was seemingly very close to winning the match. She was up by a break twice in the second set, and at 5-4, she was even serving for the match.
However, from 7-6(4), 5-4, and 15-15, Bouchard lost 11 consecutive points, and she requested a medical time out after losing the second set 5-7. After that, she made a decision to retire from the match, which was very unlucky, given she was only three points away from winning it.
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