In the run-up to the Sunshine Doubles, tennis star Naomi Osaka said that her goals for her comeback include winning the French Open and Wimbledon: "I have a lot of goals for the future, as long as I can play, I really want to win the French Open and Wimbledon and achieve a career Grand Slam." This is not the first time Naomi Osaka has made such a bold statement, long before her comeback, she directly declared: "Eight more Grand Slams". But since her comeback in early 2024, Naomi Osaka's career has always been a mixture of anticipation and loss. The four-time Grand Slam champion who lit the Olympic flame in Tokyo has suffered setbacks in his journey back to competition after giving birth. Not only failed to fulfill the promise of "returning to the top", but also fell into confusion due to injuries, public opinion pressure and identity crisis. Her predicament is not only the ups and downs of her personal competitive state, but also reflects the cruelty of professional sports, the multiple shackles of social culture on female athletes, and the complex realistic logic behind the "comeback myth".

After her comeback, Naomi Osaka has never been able to shake off the shadow of injury. In October 2024, she announced the early end of the season due to a lower back injury, withdrawing from several tournaments, including Hong Kong. This is the third time she has withdrawn due to injury in a year since her comeback – from her withdrawal from the Beijing Central Open against Gauff to the abandonment of her hometown at the Japan Open, where the decline in her physical performance has become an insurmountable obstacle for her. It is worth noting that these injuries are concentrated in the postpartum comeback stage, suggesting the deep impact of motherhood on the athlete's body. Although Osaka bluntly said that she "trains harder than ever", the physiological changes brought about by childbirth and the conflict of the intensive schedule have kept her body in a state of overload.

The deeper contradiction lies in the misalignment of society's expectations of the "mother athlete", with public opinion praising her comeback courage as a "mother and being strong" and criticizing her declining performance, but rarely discussing the scientific and time cost of postpartum recovery, which culminated in the 2024 French Open against Swiatek: she fought to match point but fell short, and admitted after the match that she was "much humbled", which is both a helplessness to the reality of competition and a deconstruction of the myth of the "perfect mother athlete".

Naomi Osaka's psychological predicament had already been foreshadowed at her peak. In the 2021 French Open withdrawal incident, she refused to attend the press conference on the grounds of depression, which sparked a big discussion on the mental health of athletes. Since her comeback, the pressure has continued unabated: Japanese society has never stopped questioning her "mixed-race identity", with netizens attacking her for being "not fluent in Japanese" and "unworthy of representing Japan", and even forcibly linking her support for BLM to her Olympic defeat. These statements not only weakened her social support system, but also put her in the "double other" dilemma, which was seen as a "representative of Asia" in the West but an "unpure" outlier in Japan.

This tear is staged on the field and turns into a shake in self-identity. When he made his comeback debut in Brisbane in 2024, his opponent Kopache refused to shake hands on the grounds of "avoiding the virus", and although it turned out to be a misunderstanding, the storm of public opinion caused by the incident once again pushed Osaka into the situation of "outcast". When labels such as race, gender, and motherhood are constantly instrumentalized by public opinion, and each swing of her racket carries a weight that surpasses that of tennis itself, this psychological consumption is far more devastating than technical mistakes.

The pace of updates and iterations in professional tennis has been much faster than expected. After her comeback, although Naomi Osaka played a classic battle with Swiatek at the French Open, in the face of the impact of new stars born in the 00s such as Gauff and Andreeva, her playing advantage gradually dissipated. The data reveals the harsh reality: her service win rate has dropped from 85% at her peak to 73% in the 2024 season, and her ability to handle key points has dropped significantly. What's even more fatal is that she tried to find a balance between "violent attack" and "tactical adjustment", but she fell into a loss of style - the collapse of winning and losing against Kapliskova exposed the shortcomings of mental toughness.

This dilemma is also closely related to its team strategy. Frequent changes of coaches (e.g. from Fassett to Mouratoglou) reflect her uncertainty about her technical path, while the balance between business and training remains unresolved. The controversy over the 2021 Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover has foreshadowed this rift: the public is eager for her to be a "sports icon" for diversity and for her to be "focused on the game". After her comeback, the rift became more acute as a mother, who had to juggle diapers and rackets, sponsorship events and rehabilitation.

Naomi Osaka's dilemma is essentially a conflict between the single evaluation system of professional sports and the complex needs of human nature. When the outside world uses the "number of Grand Slams" to measure its value, she herself has begun to reconstruct the criteria for success: at the end of 2024, she confessed that "if the results do not meet expectations, I would rather accompany my daughter", and in the statement of breaking up with her boyfriend in early 2025, she emphasized that "my daughter is the best gift", these choices reveal her reordering of the value of life. Perhaps, instead of obsessing with "getting back to the top", it would be better to admit that a comeback is a victory in itself – she proves that her mother can still compete at the top level, and her own experience is driving the tennis world to rethink the postpartum athlete protection system.

Her story is a deeper inspiration for the world of sports: when we equate "comeback" with "going back to the past", we are actually imprisoning the life experience of athletes with a linear view of time. Naomi Osaka's confusion reflects the unspoken traumas of professional sports culture: the objectification of the body, the disregard for the psyche, and the disregard for the multiple roles of women. Removing these shackles may define her legend more than looking forward to the next Grand Slam.(Source: Tennis Home Author: Xiaodi)