TENNIS – The name of Rebecca Marino first appeared as a pleasant surprise at the 2010 US Open. After a meteoric rise the Canadian struggled with depression and decided to retire at the age of 22. Later in 2013, Marino decided to give a public speech. Giulio Gasparin
The name of Rebecca Marino first appeared as a pleasant surprise in 2010, when this 20 year old Canadian qualifier defeated in the first round of the US Open Ksenia Pervak and then pulled a great fight with Venus Williams in round two.
For some 10 months, she has been climbing the ranking fast, showing great talent and conquering the hearts of many fans on the way.
In 2011, she reached her first, and only, WTA final in Memphis and later the same year, she reached a career best ranking at world number 38.
Then suddenly something happened and, one loss after another, she started to disappear as fast as she arrived.
Coming back to Memphis in 2012, she had a final to defend, but, in one of these strange coincidences of life, she lost to the player she beat when it all started: Pervak.
She took a long break from tennis after this loss, attempting a timid comeback later in the year, but when in 2013 she lost in the first round of the qualifications in Memphis, she decided she had enough.
Still aged 22, she retired from professional tennis, but in doing so, she decided to reveal what pushed her to this decision: she had been fighting depression for six years and now could not cope anymore with both the harassment from social media users and what was written about her in the press.
“Things were being written about me, and I’m quite sensitive about that, and I’m quite nosy, so I’ll look it up and then I’ll realize I shouldn’t have looked it up,” she revealed last year to the New York Times.
“With professional athletes, people put them on a pedestal sometimes, and they forget that they’re actually a person still.
“They’ll say, ‘You gave that match away, you cost me such-and-such amount of money, you should go burn in hell,’ or ‘You should go die,’ And oh, my gosh, that is really scary.
“You know, there’s that saying ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,’ But that’s not true. Names definitely hurt. Words hurt.”
Later in 2013, Marino decided to give a public speech on the Canadian channel TEDxVictoria, which is uploaded on Youtube and you can watch below.
Her story assumed then a wider value, as it gave voice to a topic that for long has been a taboo in sport: depression.
In a society that tends to idolize athletes and giving them a role model to follow, it is often forgotten how they are first of all people and they are vulnerable like everyone else. It may seem hard to believe, but clinical depression cannot be won even by awards and victories, like the recent story of cross country star, world and Olympic champion, Justyna Kowalczyk testifies.
It is very hard to spot depression from the outside, as it can be hidden behind a façade of smiles and fake normality, for this reason the speech of Marino has signed a fundamental step towards a bigger awareness of the problem, even in sport.
