How Elena Baltacha found her first love again

When Laura Robson ended Kim Clijsters’s career as she drove into the fourth round at the US Open Elena Baltacha was unmoved. It was not that she was jealous, she had just had enough of tennis. After two decades on the treadmill she had finally fallen out of love with the sport. Her last match had been at the London Olympics and there was nothing left to motivate her.

But when this year’s Australian Open came round, and Robson and Heather Watson reached the third round, she was deeply envious. “The US Open did nothing for me but watching the ­Australian it really hurt me not being there,” she said. “I’d got the love for it again.”

The love returned in the most unlikely of ways and places, while coaching a member of her academy at a minor tournament in Egypt.

Baltacha said: “I was not motivated any more after the Olympics. When you do something for so many years you go stale and that’s what happened to me. I was coaching, loving being at home, doing all the stuff I have not done for many years. Even when on court [coaching] I had no desire to come back. Then I went away to Egypt and loved it. It was not what I expected.”

Before we talk Baltacha had been demonstrating her rekindled love for her sport to year three pupils at Britannia Village Primary School in Silvertown, East London, as part of Aegon’s schools tennis programme. Her patient enthusiasm as she coached was evident.

“As an athlete you are very blinkered, you only see your side,” said the world No192. “As a mentor I began to see what Nino [Severino, her coach] meant when he spoke to me about doing certain things that I had not wanted to do. I could see my limitations. It was mental, tactical, technical, a bit of everything. I spoke to Nino so much about it I had a £500 phone bill from Egypt. Everything I said to the girl I was trying to mentor it was as if I was addressing myself. When I got home I said to Nino, ‘I think I might want to have another go’.”