Marta Kostyuk had no patience for tennis anymore. She found it in her most difficult moments

After losing a practice match against compatriot Elina Svitolina in India last December, Marta Kostyuk had had enough. She told her coach, Sandra Zaniewska, that Kostyuk would consider quitting tennis if she didn’t start the following year.

“I’ve hit rock bottom,” Kostyuk, who was ranked No. 26 at the time, said in a video interview from her home in Monaco earlier this month. “I told her it feels like I’m literally shedding my skin. Like it’s coming off, and I have to tear it, and it’s very painful because you encounter these very deep, emotional things that are hard to process.”

“I remember sitting and thinking, ‘I don’t know how long I can deal with this, because I’ve been dealing with this loss for the past four years, and it’s like layer by layer more and more things are coming to the surface.’

“I felt like I got to the point where I tried everything there was.”

Five months later, Kostyuk, 23, finds himself in a very different place. After winning the Rouen Open and then the Madrid Open, a WTA 1000 event just below the Grand Slams, she tripled the total number of WTA titles in her career, somehow dispelling the idea that she is not mentally strong enough to have the kind of career her talent deserves.

After skipping the Italian Open because she didn’t want to risk aggravating a leg problem, she arrived at the French Open on an 11-match winning streak as world No. 15. Immediately came a reminder of her daily struggles as a player.

Shortly before a 6-2, 6-3 victory over Oksana Selekhmeteva, who recently changed nationality from Russia to Spain, a rocket struck near Kostyuk’s parents’ home in Kiev during a bombardment from Russia.

“I’m incredibly proud of myself today,” Kostyuk, 23, said during her on-court interview.

“I think it was one of the most difficult matches of my career. This morning, 100 meters away from my parents’ house, a rocket destroyed the building.”

“It was a very difficult morning. I didn’t know how this match was going to go for me. I didn’t know how I was going to deal with it. I cried for part of the morning.”

“I think it is important to continue. My biggest example is the Ukrainian people. I woke up today in the morning and I looked at all these people who woke up and continued to live their lives, continued to help people who were in need. I knew that today there would be many Ukrainian flags and many Ukrainian people would come to support. My friends from Ukraine also came. I am very happy that they are here. I can’t say much.”

Three matches later, Kostyuk celebrates the biggest victory of her life. She ousted four-time champion Iga Świątek to reach the quarterfinals of the French Open, with a 7–5, 6–1 victory over Court Philippe-Chatrier.

Kostyuk’s path to understanding this reality and changing her tennis jersey was not easy. After that low point in late 2025, Kostyuk’s troubles continued into 2026.

She lost to Elsa Jacquemot in a see-saw match in the first round of the Australian Open, after reaching a final-set tiebreak despite tearing a ligament in her left ankle during a match that lasted 3 hours and 31 minutes.

After another early defeat at the Miami Open in March, Kostyuk had another heart-to-heart with Zaniewska. Data commissioned by an analytics firm suggested that Kostyuk’s performance in 2026 warranted a place in the top 10. Her ranking did not reflect that.

“I was like, ‘Yes, Sandra, it’s great – but where are the results? I’m not even close, I’m number 28. Math is not math,’” Kostyuk said.

After her title in the Madrid Open, Zaniewska gave her answer. “See, I told you,” she said with a smile.

“Just wait.”

For Kostyuk, who captured the tennis world’s attention by reaching the third round of the 2018 Australian Open at the age of 15, the wait has been much longer than a few months. That run followed a successful junior career – she was simultaneously defending girls’ singles and main draw champion – guided by her mother, who had high expectations in every way.

She entered Kostyuk’s height as 6 feet 9 inches on the tour website. Kostyuk, she said laughing, is 5-6.

After “a lot of chaos growing up,” she struggled to juggle the challenges of teenage life with the demands of life as an elite tennis player.

“I was very energetic,” she said. “I did a hundred things in a day. I was very emotional, very sensitive. I mean, I still am, it’s just different. As a child you process things differently.”

“I was crazy; I don’t know how else to put it.”

The struggle to reach her potential until this year has been “mental most of the time,” she said.

“I consider myself a pretty athletic player, but it’s still very connected to the mental part. If there are things you doubt or you’re not sure about, it’s not easy to beat that, even with physicality.”

Marta Kostyuk’s first Grand Slam breakthrough came at the 2018 Australian Open. (Peter Parks/Getty Images)

The first turning point in Kostyuk’s career came in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time. The start of the war was “a terrible time,” she said.

“Every day felt like an eternity with all the news and everything we had to do and talk about publicly. The tour part was very complicated and very frustrating, so that took a lot of energy.”

After the Sunshine Double at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California, and the Miami Open, Kostyuk returned home feeling exhausted. She said she had “suicidal thoughts” that were “very difficult for me to control.” Over the next four years, the war has remained a constant concern, a low hum punctuated by sharp jolts.

Kostyuk’s mother and sister came to live with her in Monaco when things first started, but they moved back to Ukraine after struggling to settle down.

“Many people don’t understand that when you move to another country, you have to find your place there, and it is a very, very difficult journey to integrate yourself into a new environment, a new language, new people, a new culture,” Kostyuk said.

With most of her family and friends in Ukraine, including her 74-year-old father, Kostyuk returns to visit a few times a year, on a drive from Poland that can take between 10 and 17 hours. Kostyuk was last there in April, and while there have been no major attacks while she has been home, she has practiced during air raids, during which drones and explosions could be heard in the distance.

“You live from day to day,” she said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s never stable. Some days are fine, some days they’re worse. Sometimes something really triggers me.”

Ukrainians and Russians compete against each other in tennis more often than in any other individual sport, and the post-match handshake can expose these tensions. Ukrainian players stopped shaking hands with their Russian counterparts after the invasion, a policy Kostyuk and her compatriots applied to players who changed nationalities but did not condemn the war.

Kostyuk said she initially found it “very emotional” facing Russian players after Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

“Especially if you knew… we know a lot of inside information within the tour, what someone is thinking, what someone said, what someone’s opinion is. So some of the players were even harder to play against,” she said.

This set the stage for the biggest victory of Kostyuk’s career, the Madrid Open final earlier this month against Russia’s Mirra Andreeva, the world number 8.

Marta Kostyuk won the biggest title of her career on clay at the Madrid Open in April. (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)

Everyone knew that Kostyuk and Andreeva would not shake hands at the end of their meeting in Madrid, but a final presents other complications. The awards ceremony and post-match speeches can also be fraught, and Kostyuk said her husband hoped Andreeva would lose to Hayley Baptiste in the semi-finals because he wanted to have “a really nice ceremony, a really good atmosphere.”

After her title win, Kostyuk did not mention Andreeva in her victory speech.

“Whether I win or lose, I have never had a problem recognizing my opponent,” Kostyuk said of the incident. “But at that moment when I stand on stage and give a speech, I want to sympathize with the people of Ukraine, who are bombed almost daily by Russia and Belarus.

“People are dying, people are suffering. It’s a terrible, terrible situation, and at that moment my heart is with these people, so I just can’t do it.”

Tennis authorities have yet to adhere to the International Olympic Committee’s recommendation that Belarusian athletes should play under their flag.

There are seven Ukrainian players in the top 100, and following Svitolina’s victory at the Italian Open earlier this month, they have won the last two major WTA events. Kostyuk said that when Oleksandra Oliynykova claimed that the WTA had threatened her with disqualification and fines over her comments about Russian and Belarusian players, she reached out to check on Oliynykova’s well-being.

A potential make-or-break year for Kostyuk has largely been the former so far, and Kostyuk attributes that to what she did during the toughest parts of 2022.

“I went to my mom and said, ‘Listen, I really need to get a therapist because I just can’t deal with it anymore,’” Kostyuk said.

“I made the decision within a few days. I thought, ‘Okay, this is not good, I have to deal with this, and that’s it.’

“I don’t think it’s possible to change without being aware of it. It certainly took me a lot of years to change my outlook on life, on tennis and on myself in general. I think a lot of artists struggle with this, that you can’t separate your identity from your results. So if you play badly, you think you’re a terrible person, you’re worthless. I was definitely one of those people. And it was just really hard to live like that because… I mean, we lose every week.”

Kostyuk’s perspective mirrors that of Madison Keys, the American player who was similarly tipped for big things as a youngster.

When she finally won her first Grand Slam at the Australian Open last year at the age of 29, she explained that starting therapy and being able to separate results from self-esteem had led to a fundamental change in her freedom on and off the court.

Kostyuk said many other avenues, including her coach, Zaniewska, and her Christian faith, have helped her reframe her outward emotional character on and off the court as something positive rather than negative.

“Even when I go through difficult moments and negative emotions, I realize how colorful my life is,” she said.

“The spectrum of all the emotions that I experience in different situations… It’s a very nice way to live. When you don’t have control over it, it’s very difficult, and I’ve lived that way all my life to some extent.

“That’s not fun. That’s very, very exhausting and very difficult. I think not just for me, but for everyone around me. But if you work through it, it’s great to be like that.”