From Paris to Turin
ALISHA SULLIVAN
Surprise!
I’m back for one final time this year.
If you’ve been here a while, you will know that when Naomi broke her ankle, the Sullivans went into a total tennis blackout. For a whole year.
The best part about Naomi’s return to the tour was all the tennis we got to enjoy (or suffer through, because sometimes watching someone you love play this sport is ROUGH), and how easily we could decide to just get on a train to Paris to watch the Paris Masters. Then move on to Turin.
The funniest thing about the last couple of weeks has been watching Naomi realise just how difficult it is to follow her own damn rules.
I don’t think she realised her face was so expressive because, nine times out of ten, if she’s on a tennis court, she’s not there as a fan and is instead Tennis Naomi.
But Tennis Naomi is done for the season, and regular Naomi loves a little gasp when something goes right. Or wrong. I’d say she got better at keeping cool the more she watched, but honestly, I don’t think that’s true. She just always seemed to have a hand over her face instead.
When we weren’t watching tennis, we were crossing off gifts from our Christmas list (anyone else feel like this time of year came around real quick?) and doing a lot of our true passion: eating.
We’ve spent a lot of time in Paris, so we hit all the spots we know and love, but Turin is somewhere we’d never been before.
That was a lot of fun to explore. Sometimes just us sisters, other times as a full quartet.
All explorations ended in pasta. We’ve eaten so much good pasta recently.
It’s been a huge help in inspiring new recipes for me to add to my repertoire.
Outside of all that, we also watched a lot of tennis.
I’ve never understood how the scoring works in the Finals event. It’s all very mathematical, and I cannot get it to make sense. What do you mean it can come down to points percentages?
Turin was where I also learned that Naomi doesn’t understand it either. She just shows up on court to do her job. Sometimes it goes her way, sometimes it doesn’t. Wyatt makes her treat every single match the same way, and she doesn’t think about where it places her in her group’s table.
Sam does understand the maths. He also wants to know the maths. He needs to know all the paths that he could end up going down. So Wyatt gives him what he needs, and Naomi and I go drink coffee because, despite tennis being our universe, the content of their conversation makes no sense to us.
I’ve watched Lois and Naomi duke it out on court for a grand total of fourteen hours this season, (against each other, this does not include the time they spent on court with each other) and seen matches be decided by literally one mistake, and yet I think the semi-final and final in Turin were two of the most stressful matches we’ve watched all year (actually they were the most stressful for Naomi, given that she doesn’t usually watch).
Successful, but stressful.
And now I know three people who at some point in their career have held the position of world number one.
It will never cease to amaze me that I know people who are literally the best in the world at what they do. That’s so wild. There are so many people in the field, and I know the best.
Now that Turin is done, the season is over for about a nanosecond, and in that nanosecond, we will be offline, living our lives and celebrating Christmas. Twice. (And my birthday, which is the most important)
Until next time, from an airport in Europe somewhere.