She has reached a remarkable five WTA finals this season, she’s up to a career-high ranking of No8 in the world this week, and has a real shot at qualifying for the elite eight-player season finale in Singapore this month for the first time.
With quarter-finals at Wimbledon, title runs in Katowice and Eastbourne, five top-10 victories and a wedding to long-time partner Miso Navara, 2016 has been one fantastic, emotional ride for Slovakia’s Dominika Cibulkova.
And to think that just eight months ago, she was ranked No66 in the world and trying to bounce back from an Achilles’ surgery that sidelined her for three months last season.
The 27-year-old, renowned for her aggressive playing style and grit that took her to the Australian Open final in 2014, has managed to find strength in her time of weakness, using her injury setback as a catalyst to move forward.
Cibulkova had started working with a sports psychologist – or mental coach as she prefers to call him – at the start of 2015, a decision that came in handy when she was having surgery just a couple of months later.
With help from her team and a passion for tennis that was reinvigorated during her time away from the sport, Cibulkova clawed her way back up the charts and is currently ranked No7 in the 2016 WTA Road to Singapore standings, nicely positioned as one of the best players on tour this season.
.@WTA World Number 8 💥💥💥💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻#SlovakTennis
— Dominika Cibulkova (@Cibulkova) October 3, 2016
Svetová osmička 💥💥💥🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻 pic.twitter.com/qhKhluhaZ3
“It wasn’t easy for me seeing myself around 60 or 70 in the world,” Cibulkova told Sport360 last week at the Wuhan Open where she made the final before falling to a sizzling Petra Kvitova.
“I knew I had a great preseason last year and this year I really wanted to prove that I belong there and I wanted to get there.
“It wasn’t easy in the beginning because sometimes I put too much pressure and also you’re not seeded at the tournaments, so it was tough. But after Indian Wells and Miami I felt inside that I’m playing really good tennis, I just needed one or two good results to get my confidence and it will be great and that’s what I did, that’s what happened.
“Of course those months that I didn’t play last year helped me because I realised I really want to play tennis. Because sometimes when you’re on the tour you feel like oh you’re tired and you don’t want to do this anymore. So this time off gave me like new energy.”
At 1.61m, Cibulkova is one of the shortest players on tour, and despite being told growing up that she didn’t have the body for tennis, the Slovak never let it stop her from pursuing a career in the sport and instead, she found ways to compensate for the difference in height between her and her opponents.
“It happened a lot of times that people told me I cannot really play because I’m too short, since I started playing tennis until maybe I was 14 years old, all the time. It always just made me want to be better though,” she explains.
Her fitness is something she knew would give her an advantage over her rivals and it’s obvious it is one of the main reasons she has done so well this year.
Gaining confidence from her strong physical preparation in the offseason, Cibulkova has made finals on all three surfaces in 2016 – hard, clay and grass – and she’s particularly proud of her consistency throughout.
In Wuhan, she played and won her last-16 clash against Karolina Pliskova and quarter-final against Barbora Strycova in one day (over five sets), then returned 20 hours later to grind through a three-set victory over Svetlana Kuznetsova. This late in the season, where the majority of players are running on fumes, Cibulkova was impressively pulling off double duty.
“I’m not the tallest player on tour and I always say I need to have something extra to even beat these players or be on the same level. This (my physical ability) is one of my things. I need to be more than hundred per cent,” said Cibulkova after her triumph over Kuznetsova in Wuhan.
“My physical preparation is really, really hard and tough because I need to be ready more than the other girls who can serve aces and something like that.
“I still want to stay focused and I don’t want to put it in my head that I’m tired and I cannot anymore. That’s what always happened to me during this period, especially here in Asia. I just want to prove to myself that I can really make it until the end.”
Cibulkova’s style of play often resembles that of a boxer, she’s quick on her feet and carries a mean punch, unleashing a loud ‘pome’ (Slovak equivalent to ‘vamos’) with each blow. She featured in one of the best matches of the year when she hit 56 winners en route to beating Agnieszka Radwanska 9-7 in the third to make the Wimbledon quarter-finals.
Was she this aggressive growing up?
“Personality-wise, yes I had a lot of energy and stuff like that, but when I was young, I was just running on the court and putting the balls back, I was never an aggressive player,” she recalls. “During my career, I had a lot of coaches and they had a big impact on me and that’s how I started to play more and more aggressive, I was improving my forehand and that’s how I became a really aggressive player with a lot of energy on the court.”
It’s been an eventful year in women’s tennis with Angelique Kerber ending Serena Williams’ three and a half-year reign at No1, thanks to her two grand slam titles, Maria Sharapova receiving a doping suspension, Victoria Azarenka taking time off due to her pregnancy, and Garbine Muguruza winning a major.
Does Kerber’s ascension to the top make things any different for Cibulkova on tour?
“I wouldn’t say it affects me in any way, but I was really glad that Angelique Kerber is the one who took the lead because I think she’s a very nice person, and she works really hard and this gives a lot of belief to the other players that she was able to win two grand slams during one year, and that’s something unbelievable and it’s something nice to see,” she replied.
Despite losing early to Alize Cornet in Beijing this week, Cibulkova is still in the running for clinching one of the last three available spots in the WTA Finals in Singapore. She was close to qualifying for the event in 2014 but missed out.
“I was over-motivated and it didn’t happen,” she told WTA Insider earlier this year.
What about this time around?
“It’s great to be in this position because I had a great season obviously, but if I look at it the other way, I never reached the Masters (WTA Finals) and I really would like to get there so you have to find this balance between these two feelings. I really want to do well but I don’t want to get myself too stressed,” she says.
