Nick Kyrgios makes telling comment about Andy Murray after Brit’s tennis retirement
Nick Kyrgios has insisted he won’t be “crawling to the finish line” of his career like tennis legends Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal.
Despite planning a comeback in December ahead of the Australian Open, Kyrgios admitted he still endures mental health struggles. The Canberra native openly admitted: “I fight it most days.”
The 2022 Wimbledon runner-up has been limited to a single ATP match over the past year due to a series of injuries affecting his knee, foot, and wrist. Kyrgios, 29, has even dropped hints about potentially retiring from the sport in the near future.
Murray, 37, marked his farewell from tennis after the Paris 2024 Olympics, while 38-year-old Nadal will follow suit at the upcoming Davis Cup finals. And both legends of the game share in common the fact they’ve had to deal with persistent injuries in their careers.
Kyrgios maintains a friendly rapport with Dunblane native Murray and said: “I look at how Andy Murray’s doing it now, and how Rafael is going out, I don’t want to be like that either, I don’t want to be kind of crawling to the finish line in a sense.
“What Andy Murray’s achieved in this sport is second to basically no one, like, unless you’re Novak [Djokovic], [Roger] Federer, or Nadal, like, the next person is Andy Murray. It’s like you’ve achieved everything. You deserve to go out, I think, a little bit more gracefully than he’s done. I think, that the surgeries, the pain, it’s just not worth it, in my opinion.”
During a recent appearance on The Louis Theroux Podcast (via the Daily Express), Kyrgios confided that Murray had noticed him self-harming during what he described as a “bad period” at Wimbledon in 2019.