Naomi Osaka, the mother who would trade titles and keeps chasing a fifth Slam

Naomi Osaka

Photo: si.robi / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 16, 1997 Chūō-ku
Occupation	Tennis Player
Awards	Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year · Associated Press Athlete of the Year · Time 100

The sentence that unsettled tennis came after a loss to a qualifier in Miami. Naomi Osaka, a four-time Grand Slam champion and once the top-ranked player in the world, told reporters that she wanted to win titles, and that if the price was losing a lot of time with her daughter, she would rather not. It sounded like the start of a goodbye. What came next was the best clay and grass stretch of her career, capped by a Wimbledon quarterfinal she reached by beating the woman at the top of the rankings, Aryna Sabalenka.

That gap, between a player who says tennis no longer sits at the centre of her life and a player producing results she never managed when it did, is the most interesting thing about Osaka now. It also rewrites an older story, the one in which she was cast as the fragile prodigy the sport had broken.

Her tennis began as a plan borrowed from someone else. Her father, Leonard François, who is from Jacmel in Haiti, watched Venus and Serena Williams at the 1999 French Open and decided to raise his two daughters the way Richard Williams had raised his, although he had barely played himself. Her mother, Tamaki Osaka, comes from Nemuro in Hokkaido; the couple met in Sapporo. Their younger daughter arrived on October 16, 1997, in Chūō-ku, Osaka, and like her older sister Mari she took her mother’s surname, the custom in Japan when only one parent held Japanese citizenship.

The family moved to Elmont, on Long Island, when she was three, and later to Florida, where she hit on the public courts of Pembroke Pines by day and was homeschooled at night. Her parents decided early that both girls would play for Japan rather than for the country that was raising them. When the USTA offered her a place at its national centre in Boca Raton at 15, she declined. The choice kept its weight: before the Tokyo Olympics she gave up her American citizenship, and at the opening ceremony she became the first tennis player to light the Olympic cauldron.

The professional arrival was fast and loud. At 16 she beat former US Open champion Samantha Stosur in her first WTA match, at Stanford in 2014. Two years later she reached her first final, at the Pan Pacific Open in Tokyo, and was named the WTA’s Newcomer of the Year. With Sascha Bajin, a former hitting partner of Serena Williams, she won Indian Wells in 2018 and then the US Open, beating Williams in a final that dissolved into a dispute between Williams and the umpire and a trophy ceremony drowned out by boos. Osaka, 20 years old, told the crowd she was sorry it had to end like that.

The Australian Open followed in early 2019, and with it the No. 1 ranking, the first time an Asian player had held it in singles. Weeks later she split with Bajin, saying she would not put success over her happiness, a line that read as a curiosity at the time and reads as a forecast now. Two more majors came: a second US Open in 2020 and a second Australian Open in 2021. The 2020 title is remembered less for the tennis than for the seven masks she wore onto court in New York, each carrying the name of a Black American killed by police or racist violence, among them Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Trayvon Martin.

The reading that hardened around her after that is too tidy. In 2021 Osaka refused to give press conferences at Roland-Garros, was fined $15,000 and threatened with expulsion, then withdrew and disclosed that she had lived with depression since that first US Open. Wimbledon went unplayed, and a loss to Leylah Fernandez in New York ended with an indefinite break. The episode turned her into a symbol, praised and resented in roughly equal measure, of an athlete refusing an obligation the sport treated as part of the job. Less discussed is that she was by then the highest-paid female athlete in history, with $37.4 million earned in 2020, and that the commercial machine she was accused of shirking was one she was learning to own. In 2022 she left IMG and founded her own agency, Evolve, with her agent Stuart Duguid, along with a production company, Hana Kuma. Not every deal aged well: after the collapse of FTX she was among the celebrity promoters sued by investors.

Osaka announced her pregnancy in early 2023, and her daughter Shai, with the rapper Cordae, was born that July. She came back at Brisbane in January 2024 and found the tour unsentimental. At Roland-Garros she held a match point against Iga Świątek and lost; at the Paris Olympics she went out in the first round to Angelique Kerber, and a back injury cut her season short in October. The couple separated at the start of 2025, and she described it without bitterness, calling Cordae an awesome dad.

The turn came through a coaching change. After stints with Wim Fissette and Patrick Mouratoglou, she began working in 2025 with Tomasz Wiktorowski, the Polish coach who had guided Świątek. That summer she reached the final in Montreal and the US Open semifinals, beating Coco Gauff along the way before losing in three sets to Amanda Anisimova. This season pushed the change onto the surfaces that had always exposed her. She reached the fourth round of the French Open for the first time, played her first grass-court final at Bad Homburg, where a foot injury forced her to retire against Karolína Muchová, and then beat Sabalenka at Wimbledon before Muchová stopped her in the quarterfinals. Asked what had changed, she pointed at her coach: the big Polish man.

The body has not always gone along with it. Abdominal injuries ended her 2025 season early and pulled her out of the Australian Open in January. At the US Open in September she pushed through lower-leg pain to beat Elise Mertens, a sideline disagreement with Wiktorowski went viral, and Elena Rybakina ended her run in the fourth round. She says, all the same, that there is still an opportunity to win a Slam.

Osaka arrives at the China Open in Beijing, where she won the title in 2019, ranked 17th in the world and seeded 12th. Her next match is against Maria Timofeeva in the second round. She turns 29 on October 16, with both of her stated priorities still intact and a fifth major still the thing she is openly chasing.

Tags: sports, athletes, US Open, tennis players, Wimbledon, Aryna Sabalenka, Serena Williams, Australian Open, Naomi Osaka

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