Tennis Star Naomi Osaka Is Pregnant With 1st Baby

As tennis was emerging from its brief off-season, with players of all station eager to launch into a new-year reset in Australia, Tennis Channel analyst Pam Shriver predicted, “I think 2023 will be a really important year to see if Naomi Osaka can get back to being the person who won four hard-court majors in a short window of time.”

But as 2023 began to unspool, tennis officials, pundits and fans wondered, with mounting bewilderment and anxiety, what plans Osaka had regarding the upcoming Australian Open. The tournament organizers laid their questions to rest on Sunday, announcing that Osaka is taking a hard pass on the tournament—the second major of the last three that she is skipping. Her record in the three Grand Slams she entered in 2022 was 2-2.

As Shriver implied, the Australian Open looms large on Osaka’s resume, and it played a central role in her meteoric rise. She backed up her maiden Grand Slam triumph, at the 2018 US Open, just months later Down Under—and won there again in 2021, thereby positioning herself as arguably the best hard-court player in the world. If there is any event where Osaka’s history, as well as the tournament’s general vibe, is conducive to a career reset, it’s the “Happy Slam.” Instead, the feeling grows that the complicated 25-year old who launched a long-running dialogue about mental health in professional athletics is done with the sport that was her springboard to fame, wealth and celebrity.



This most recent series of events played out in a baffling manner, skewing uncomfortably close to thoughtlessness—or mere indifference—on the part of Osaka and/or her team. In late October, Osaka posted on Instagram, thanking legions of her birthday well-wishers for their “love and messages.” She signed off with the words, “I really don’t know what I did to deserve it all. Love you and I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

But as Osaka’s social media account became devoid of tennis content in the intervening months; tracking her career intentions has been reduced to following a trail of breadcrumbs. About a week ago, Osaka was tagged in a photo originally posted by a Los Angeles pilates studio. On her own Instagram, Osaka most recently posted an image of sitting with her boyfriend in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. As tennis fans went into a tizzy, given the approaching Australian Open, Twitter sleuths deduced that the photo, since removed, was taken during the couple’s October sojourn in France.

Was Osaka making some kind of statement? Punking tennis? Perhaps Osaka is telling us that she is just so over tennis, and that we should get over it too. Maybe she’s signaling that, as the highest-paid female athlete of 2022 ($51.1 million, of which just $1.1 million was earned in prize money on a modest 14-9 record), she is moving on much bigger and more rewarding things. Those would include lucrative sponsorship deals and entrepreneurial enterprises.