Life as a top tennis player may appear luxurious, but the demanding lifestyle can come at a significant cost. Achieving success on the international stage requires more than talent - it takes an incredible amount of time and dedication to training.
As a result, elite tennis players face challenges in their private lives, sacrificing leisure activities and precious time with loved ones, while forging romantic connections can also prove difficult - something that Emma Raducanu, Carlos Alcaraz and Andy Murray know all too well.
During an interview with The Sunday Times last year, Alcaraz acknowledged the pressures of maintaining a love life, saying: "I am single. I am looking for someone. It can be difficult as a tennis player to meet the right person because you are travelling all the time."
READ MORE: Emma Raducanu snub earns brilliantly honest response from Jack Draper
READ MORE: Jack Draper shows true colours with response to Emma Raducanu doubles snub
Just a year earlier, he told Vogue: "It's complicated, never staying in one place. It's hard to find the person who can share things with you if you're always in different parts of the world."
Whether Alcaraz's personal circumstances have since shifted remains to be seen, but the tennis pro has yet to go public with a relationship. British sensation Raducanu, meanwhile, told The Times about a boyfriend ban in her household during her formative years as a player.
She said: "My parents were very much against [boyfriends] as it interfered with training. When I was younger, I wasn't even allowed to hang out with my girl friends. A lot of the time I was very resentful, but it made me very confident and comfortable in my own company."
After reaching adulthood, Raducanu went public with her relationship with Carlo Agostinelli in 2023. Sadly, insiders told The Sun the next year that they had split and that the relationship had "run its course".
Even tennis veterans like Murray can recount the clash between professional life and personal affairs. Murray recently told GQ about the effect his career had on his honeymoon with Kim Sears after their 2015 wedding. He said: "When we got married, our honeymoon was in Barcelona, and I was doing a training block.
"Essentially, we got to spend a couple of nights with each other, but I was practising during the day, training and going to the gym and doing all my physio work. [A honeymoon] is very important for most couples.
"Maybe for her it was too, but she was willing to sacrifice that to allow me to chase my goals. She's super important to everything I achieved, so now I'm trying my best to make up for all that."
He added: "She's been a huge support and a massive, massive part of my career. When you're playing, you don't always appreciate that. I think a lot of individual athletes - me included - would be selfish at times. You think a lot about yourself and your own performance, and your mood is reflective of whether you've had a good match. Say, I won. I'm in a good mood. I lost, I'm in a bad mood.
"It's not really fair on the people around you. But even at the end, when I was struggling physically and was not winning many matches, and we had young children, Kim was always so supportive of me continuing to play because she knew I loved the sport and loved playing."
