The mother of all comebacks

An excerpt from my book, Building Champions

Last week was publication day for Building Champions. After hours spent interviewing players, coaches, and experts, months spent transcribing and writing the thing, plus a few more months editing and stressing myself out about it all, people are finally getting their hands on my book!

I’m so incredibly excited/nervous/proud that people will get to read a real life book I’ve written, and thought it only made sense to share an excerpt with you all here.

I’ve chosen Chapter 5, which transports you back to 2009 and homes in on the beginnings of Kim Clijsters’ return to tennis after the birth of her daughter. It was a comeback for the ages, as she remains the only woman this century to win Grand Slam titles after becoming a mother, and I loved speaking to members of her team about their memories from that incredible first season 16 years ago.

Before we begin, as a thank you for the support on here over the past year, I’m going to be running a giveaway next week, where I’ll send two subscribers a free copy of Building Champions.

To be in with a chance to win, all you need to do is be an existing PAID subscriber to But Do You Actually Like Sport? by June 17th. You can upgrade your subscription via the button below, winners to be announced on June 18th.

But now, to the excerpt!

KIM Clijsters is running around an athletics track in Bree, just a stone’s throw from her home in the east of Belgium. Her icy breath is visible with every gasp, and she breathes heavily. Her trainer Sam Verslegers is bounding along beside her, trying to get her to talk through their training plans for the next few months.

It is February 2009, almost a year to the day since Clijsters gave birth to her first child, Jada, and, sadly, barely a month since the death of her beloved father and mentor Lei. It is also nearly two years since she retired from tennis, aged just 23.

Local physiotherapist and osteopath Verslegers has known Clijsters since she was a teenager breaking into the WTA Tour, when he was introduced to her via her younger sister Elke. He helped treat Clijsters’ injuries prior to her retirement and has agreed to help her get back to fitness for an exhibition event at Wimbledon in the summer. He thought an hour’s run would be the best bet to talk through plans. But Clijsters is in no fit state to chat. ‘My plan was to talk a bit during the jogging about what she wants and how I see it,’ Verslegers recalls. ‘But we started jogging and Kim couldn’t talk; there was no conditioning at all. I said this isn’t going to work, we’ll talk after.’

After calling time on her career with one major title to her name, Clijsters had spent the past year caring for her new daughter as well as for her father during the last months of his illness. Agreeing to play the exhibition event at Wimbledon that summer, to mark the opening of the newly built Centre Court roof, was her way of bring- ing some normality to her routine. But within weeks, her appetite for real competition had returned. And, barely six months after this laboured jog with Verslegers, Clijsters would be juggling the US Open trophy and daughter Jada on each hip, as confetti rained down on her on the Arthur Ashe Stadium court.

The victory was not only Clijsters’ triumphant return to the tour, but it also marked the first time in 39 years that a mother had won a major tennis tournament post-partum. In the 15 years since Clijsters’ victory in 2009, no other woman has been able to repeat the feat. ‘Maybe it looked easy,’ Verslegers says, ‘but it isn’t easy at all.’

Clijsters never intended to become tennis’s poster girl for motherhood. When she retired in 2007, she genuinely believed she was done with the sport. She had reached her goals: she won her long-awaited major title in 2005 at the US Open, after losing her first four Grand Slam finals. She had reached world No. 1 in both singles and doubles, and she had enjoyed brief rivalries with compatriot Justine Henin and the Williams sisters. Now, she wanted to get married, have a family and move away from the nomadic lifestyle required in her profession. Even in those final months of what she now dubs her ‘first career’, she struggled to find motivation.

Wim Fissette was her hitting partner that season, and remembers ‘everything had become difficult’ for Clijsters. She lacked motivation and getting her on the practice court six days in a row was a challenge as she was dogged by persistent injuries. Her father tried to get different friends and family to travel with her to add a bit of variation to the grind of daily tour life. But within herself, she knew she lacked that internal drive. After a hip injury blighted most of the spring of 2007, she called time on her career when she lost in the first round in Warsaw. ‘The recurring injuries, having difficulty in getting out of bed in the morning, needing about an hour to get all the muscles warmed up, the demanding preparations of the marriage with Brian. It all makes things a bit difficult to keep on going,’ she said in her statement. ‘It has been more than fun, but the rackets are being hung up.’

Fissette was not surprised in the slightest: ‘She definitely needed a break.’ He had known Clijsters since he was a talented 15-year-old junior player, and she was the prodigious 12-year-old who practised with the boys. In early 2007, he quit his office job to travel on tour with her full-time, so her sudden retirement was not exactly ideal for him on a professional level. But Fissette was not completely convinced Clijsters was actually done. ‘From the beginning, I always had the feeling, this is not the end,’ he says. When he got a call from her agent in early 2009 about helping her get fit for an exhibition, he was game and joined up with Verslegers and Clijsters in Bree.

A couple of weeks into their sessions, Clijsters started to get the itch to compete. Though no one in her camp was shocked, she was the most surprised when the idea of a comeback became hard to shake. ‘It’s the challenge I felt within me that got triggered,’ Clijsters says. ‘My gut instinct really. I lost my dad, then I got invited to come to Wimbledon when they had the new roof on Centre Court, so me preparing for that made me think, hmm, this is fun – where could this take me? I’m too young to just do exhibitions. It triggered the will to compete. I still love hitting the ball, the hunger to take on that challenge and see how far I could go became very strong – to the point where I had to start telling people around me from my team. I was a bit nervous about it in the beginning.’

Other than her husband, Brian Lynch, the first person she confided in was Verslegers: ‘Whenever I lay on the table when he was treating me, that’s when all my thoughts would come out. He was kind of like my psychologist; I would call him my communicative wall. After a few weeks I said: “Sam, I need to tell you, I’m feeling this, I want to take this challenge on.” And he said: “You still have a long way to go if that’s where you want to go, so let’s see how it feels.”’

Verslegers cannot remember the exact conversation. But he does remember a feeling of inevitability. ‘I was surprised and not surprised,’ he says now, chuckling. ‘I thought, let’s start with the exhibition. But for her the exhibition was nothing; she wanted real competition.’

Verslegers is not prone to hyperbole. He is rather understated and has an endearing humility about him, despite forming a key part of one of tennis’s greatest stories in recent memory. So when Clijsters turned to him for advice, he was cautious about his own expertise and even had a sense of imposter syndrome. Verslegers recalls: ‘She said: “I want to see and feel if I can beat these girls again. I want to work for that. Do you think it’s possible?” For me, that was hard to tell,’ Verslegers says. ‘I’d never travelled with an individual athlete; I’d never even been at a Grand Slam tennis tour- nament from beginning to end. Who am I to say this is possible, Kim? But I saw already on the court that, for me, she played the same. Then I said: “Probably when you work on your physical, get you to a point where your cardio, physical strength and flexibility is where it has to be, you have a real good chance to beat these girls.” From that moment she started working out harder.’

News of her comeback broke in late March, and made headlines nationally, as well as around the world. Clijsters said she was eyeing a return during the late summer US Open swing, and accompanied the announcement with a confident statement: ‘I don’t plan to go there as a tourist and come back home after one or two rounds.’

As strong as that sentiment was, she mostly stayed away from the limelight and did not rush things. Instead she spent six quiet months in sleepy Bree, a small city on the east Belgian border with the Netherlands, which is home to barely 16,000 residents. As a former US Open champion, Clijsters was one of the most recognisable figures in Belgian sport, even then. At Verslegers’ clinic though, she was like any other of his clients. She would diligently work out at the tiny 80 square-metre gym – not even half the size of a tennis court – completing her weight sessions squeezed in alongside a middle- aged non-athlete, recovering from a heart attack, and a young teen cyclist, hoping to make a splash at regional level. ‘Everybody was coming as normal, and then you had Kim Clijsters in the middle,’ Verslegers says. ‘Everybody still knows who Kim Clijsters is but, to be honest, in Bree in my office where she worked out, she never got asked for a picture or autographs. They just left her to do her stuff, left her alone. They said: “She’s Kim, she’s one of us – we know her, she’s great.”’

Verslegers and Fissette had a grand total of four hours each morning to work with Clijsters – including tennis training, fitness work and body treatments for any niggles that cropped up. By lunchtime, she wanted to be home with Jada, prioritising family time. The limited window they had to work with makes her comeback all the more impressive. ‘It was not an easy job to fit everything in,’ Verslegers says. ‘For an athlete who’s completely out of shape, you want six hours a day to work on them and build. We had only the morning. But it was all quality, and it worked. She was better every session, every week she was growing and getting better in shape, getting stronger. Everybody could see she was making progress. I could see it and she could feel it. Feeling those steps she was making gave her more hunger to be even better.’

On the tennis court, Clijsters was firing on all cylinders pretty quickly. She was more focused than Fissette had seen her in years. ‘It was the opposite of 2007; it was like an extreme internal motivation. The happiness of being back on the court, finding back the love for the game. Everything she did was with full intensity, you never had to push her. It was more like you had to stop her. Another big difference was she was very coachable; she wanted to learn, develop more. She wanted to become a better player. The work ethic was very different.’

Her childhood coach, Bart Van Kerckhoven watched her train during one of those early sessions. ‘Playing like that, you’ll reach the US Open finals this year,’ he told her. She laughed, replying: ‘If I make the finals, I will fly you to New York.’

Clijsters was not necessarily banking on having to keep that promise, as she did not anticipate such swift success. But just a couple of weeks into training she was goal-setting with Fissette and painted an ambitious picture. This was a woman looking to push herself much further than anyone had previously done post-pregnancy in tennis in decades.

Fissette recalls their conversation while standing on the tennis court in Bree, where she outlined her three top goals for this ‘second career’: winning a Grand Slam as a mum, beating the best players in the world and becoming world No. 1. It was music to Fissette’s ears. ‘When she left the tour, she was still a top player, right? So she was confident that she was definitely going to be a top 10 player. The question was if she was able to beat the best players in the world, like Serena and Venus at that time.’

While Fissette saw the potential, he says the tennis needed to take a back seat at the beginning of their seven-month training block. It began with 90 per cent physical work and 10 per cent tennis, that balance shifting every week, until they got to 50/50 – but never more than that. That was partly because of how tight the daily schedule with Clijsters was. Verslegers had his work cut out. From a cardio perspective, Clijsters was starting ‘from zero’. She was also easily bored by fitness sessions, so he had to be inventive: running, biking, mountain biking, kayaking, swimming and aqua jogging all figured into their programme. At the gym they would combine speed and strength-based training. When time was especially tight, they would do it all on a tennis court, using combination exercises that saw her work with a racket in hand, plus a medicine ball and resistance bands.

Her favourite sessions, though, were spent in a nearby woods, 15 minutes outside of Bree. In the middle of the trees there was a large sand hill with a plateau at the top. Verslegers would have her doing speed, jumping and acceleration training in the sand, and running sprints up the dune itself. ‘I would tell her: “I’ll pick you up at 9 a.m. tomorrow – bring your tennis shoes, running shoes and an extra T-shirt, because you’ll sweat through the first one,”’ Verslegers recalls. ‘We’d practise there for hours – really tough, but also really fun.’

For Verslegers, one of the main challenges was not just that Clijsters had zero conditioning. It was also that her body had experienced major events like pregnancy and childbirth – and he had never worked with an elite athlete aiming to return to the top of their sport as a mother. There was very little scientific research to support him either. Other athletes have experienced this too, including the poster girl for British Olympic sport Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill. She became the heptathlon world champion in 2015, just over a year after giving birth to her first child, but has since described the lack of information available to help guide new mothers that happen to be elite sportswomen. Mastering her seven disciplines involved strength, twisting, explosive power and endurance, and trying to reclaim those skills in a way that was safe for her body was a minefield.

Personal trainer Baz Moffat is co-author of The Female Body Bible and chief executive of The Well HQ, which is dedicated to female athlete health expertise. She says the dearth of information and training available on pregnancy, as it relates to elite sport, remains an issue to this day. ‘What has absolutely happened over the last 10 years, because of pioneering women like Serena Williams, Paula Radcliffe, Jess Ennis-Hill, is women think, oh we can do that, and that is now filtering down to grassroots sport. But what is missing is the system. There’s still a huge amount of confusion about what pregnant women can or can’t do. In the UK only 8 per cent of personal trainers have a pre- or postnatal qualification. One of the critical gaps is between the evidence and the practitioners. The evidence is starting to come out about how it’s safe to train during a straightforward pregnancy. And actually, women do have the capability to lift weights and do high intensity training. When you come to elite sport they don’t know what to do, because there isn’t a clear return-to-play guidance. There’s a massive gap between telling the practitioners on the ground what to do in most sports.’

When Moffat was seeking out her own qualifications in pre- and postnatal exercise back in 2011, her teacher was considered ‘a bit extreme’ by some in the industry for promoting the idea that pregnant and postnatal women could do functional movements like squatting, deadlifting and lifting weights. ‘At that stage, the mes- saging for pregnant and post-partum women was very much “rest is best, do some aqua aerobics”,’ she says.

That was the landscape when Verslegers was starting his own work with Clijsters, and he admits it was completely new territory for him. ‘At that time I was working with a number of athletes from different sports, but never before with a female athlete who wanted to get back to the top after pregnancy,’ Verslegers says. ‘There are enough books about postnatal exercises and recovery, both mentally and physically, but little was or is known about the road to top sport after pregnancy. It wasn’t just post-pregnancy, but Kim’s father had also died in 2009. It was mentally and physically really tough at the beginning.’

He had to apply what he knew about the impact of pregnancy on the average person’s body, and adapt that to work for an athlete of Clijsters’ calibre. ‘In the injury prevention I did a lot of tests on her stability in her pelvis and her lower back. She had problems with the stability of her pelvis due to pregnancy and the delivery, so we had to work on glutes, abdominal, core and pelvic stability exercises. You would do it after pregnancy with regular people, but with athletes you go to higher levels, higher loads, to get everything stable when they’re trying to get faster and more powerful.’

One thing he tried – but failed – to block Clijsters from doing was her trademark shot: the splits forehand. ‘Kim has very lax joints naturally. By the pregnancy, it was getting even more lax and that was a disadvantage. She was great at defensive balls, the famous stance where she’s in the splits when hitting the ball. It’s good she can do it, that’s an advantage, but it’s a disadvantage that every time she does it she has the rotation of her pelvis. After pregnancy it was even looser. I told her many times: “No splits, please; use your legs, don’t split.” She didn’t listen all the time. When she used that a lot in a match it was always that I’d have to adjust something in the pelvis or back, or both, after the match. It did have an effect. But that’s her move! And she won important points with that too, eh?’

With those intensive months of work behind her, it was now about what could transpire on the court. Clijsters and the team – which now included Verslegers, Fissette, her agent John Dolan, her husband Brian, daughter Jada and the family nanny – packed up their bags and headed Stateside.

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Building Champions is out now! You can buy it at various UK booksellers, or online via my publisher Birlinn’s website, Waterstones, Amazon, or Bookshop.org.

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Thanks for reading!

Molly x