Jessica Pegula revealed that her preparation leading up to the 2023 Roland Garros was impacted by food poisoning.
The 29-year-old American player cruised through the first two rounds of the clay-court Grand Slam, also thanks to her colleague from the WTA Tour, Camila Giorgi, retiring in their second-round match at the 2023 Roland Garros.
But things didn't always go well for Pegula this year, especially during her preparations for the French Open. The highest-ranked American, who also shared her thoughts on the disparity of night matches, spoke in a column for BBC about how food poisoning ruined her preparations.
"Coming into this week's French Open, my preparations were completely thrown by getting food poisoning on my first night and first dinner in Paris. What horrendous luck - I haven't gone out to a restaurant since because I've been too afraid to eat there."
Despite being an athlete and certainly closely monitoring her diet, Pegula wasn't sure where the poisoning came from. She knew she ate escargots and also had salmon, but she couldn't pinpoint the main reason for her food poisoning.
"I don't know exactly what did the damage. I had escargots - I love escargots - but everyone else in my group had them. I also had salmon so maybe it was a bad piece of fish. I was throwing up for the whole night and I couldn't sleep much."
The American player immediately felt the effects of the food poisoning, and as a result, she was unable to practice on Tuesday when she arrived in the French capital or the day after on Wednesday. Her first training session took place on Thursday.
"That was after I arrived in Paris on Tuesday, I didn't practise on Wednesday, I practised on Thursday - but it was not pretty. I could barely do anything."
On top of that, the food poisoning affected Pegula also in a different way. After going through that period, she was afraid to eat anything else as she felt that she could experience the same thing again, and as an athlete, she obviously needed to eat to have energy for practice.
"I was getting a lot of nausea and acid reflux, I wasn't eating. I was afraid to eat anything. I didn't have an appetite. It lingered for four or five days but I wasn't able to just sit in bed, I had a bunch of stuff to do."
Overall, Pegula's preparation for the second Grand Slam of the season was terrible, but she still managed to utilize her talent to win the first two matches and set up a third-round meeting with Elise Mertens.