Kimiko Date lost by 0-6 0-6 in the first round of a WTA international still ongoing in Tokyo, against Krunic: Date was of course the moral winner, as it was also acknowledged by Krunic who, at the end of the match, bowed in front of her opponent (that was cute); thus, at the age of 47 (or more precisely, 46 and 349 days), Date seems to have, eventually, retired. She has given a retirement speech of 9 minutes after her match; it was in Japanese, so I had a bit of troubles understanding it, especially because I missed some way of saying that were not too familiar to me. I am sure that a translation is available somewhere on the web but I did not look for it, since basically I do not expect Date to have said anything particularly surprising.
Eventually, also Kimiko had to give up her fight against time: she gave a hard struggle but, sadly enough, even if virtually immortal, in a sense she has lost: she was not able to achieve her last goal as a player, which was to compete until she would have turned 50.
As many of you know, this is not the first retirement of Kimiko, as she first quitted competitive tennis in 1996; from her prodigious comeback in 2008, she has won several ITF tournaments, the last of which was a 75k in Dubai in 2012, at the age of 42; in 2009 she won a WTA event in Seoul, at the age of 39; she anyway reached another WTA event’s final in India, in 2013 (being, thus, 43 year old). From 2009 to 2015 she ended each season in the top 150 players in the world, with a last peak in 2013 when, aging 43, she ended in 54th spot, having qualified in such year to the third round of both Wimbledon and of the Australian Open.
Date got injured in 2016: she made a further attempt of comeback and played some ITF events in July, but it seems that this time it didn’t work.
I tried to find out who was the first opponent of Date on the Pro Tour: I didn’t succeed, since it seems that such data is too seasoned to be found on the WTA website. Curiously enough, though, the third last match of her career was played against an old friend of this website, i.e. Usue Arconada, born in 1998. The last match of Arconada on the Junior Tour was played only 7 months before she played against Date: it was December 2016, when she lost against Potapova in the Orange Bowl. Date gave a last hard struggle to Arconada, managing to grab a set from her: thus, I guess it’s fair that both Franco and myself greet and send a tight hug to such a fierce opponent of one of the most prominent last years’ junior players, on whom TennisUnderworld has focused several times.
