Simona Halep was one of the favorites for the title throughout most of the first half of 2021—after all, she was ranked No. 2 or No. 3 the entire time. In Rome, however, tragedy struck when Halep injured her left calf while leading Angelique Kerber 6-1, 3-3 in her first set. She had to retire from that match and missed Roland Garros and Wimbledon. She then pulled out of the Olympics as well.
Halep returned to the tour in August, three months later, but the damage had already been done to her ranking. She went from No. 3 to No. 9 after her points from winning Wimbledon in 2019 dwindled, and she dropped from No. 10 to No. 13 after her points from reaching the quarterfinals in Canada in 2019 dropped. Halep was questioned in Montreal this year whether she watched any tournaments as she was recovering from her injury.
“Honestly, I didn’t watch,” she said. “Just a few balls, few games, but I didn’t pay attention. It was too painful to watch the matches. When you are injured, you feel sad and disappointed. It’s not really good, in my opinion, to watch the matches. But the time home was great. I was with my family. I was with my friends. So I needed this break to recharge my batteries, mentally first and of course physically, because of the injury. It’s not good in the middle of the year to get that break, but still I see the better part—it was good to recover a little bit.”
Despite a few setbacks—she lost her opening match in her first tournament back in Montreal to a red-hot Danielle Collins, then had to withdraw mid-tournament in Cincinnati due to a thigh injury—and despite slipping to No. 22 in the rankings, Halep completed the year well. The Romanian won 13 of her final 17 matches of the year, including a fourth-round appearance at Flushing Meadows (her 20th appearance in the second week of a Grand Slam) and a final appearance at the Transylvanian Open in Cluj-Napoca, Romania (the 40th WTA final of her career).
Halep rose from No. 22 to No. 20 in the year-end rankings after reaching another quarterfinal in Linz, giving her an astounding ninth consecutive Top 20 finish. Perhaps more crucially, it was an upward trend that helped her finish off a due to injuries 2021, and if she can maintain that fall form into 2022, it'll only be a matter of time until the 2018 Roland Garros and 2019 Wimbledon champion begins another Top 10 run.