As the return of Roger Federer to professional tennis nears it has been confirmed that the former world No.1 will not be playing at a top tournament later this month.
The 20-time Grand Slam champion has officially withdrawn from the Miami Open which is the first Masters 1000 event set to take place this year. Federer is a four-time champion of the tournament and won the most recent edition back in 2019. Last year the event was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In a statement issued to The Press Association, Federer’s agent Tony Godsick confirmed that the Swiss Maestro will not be travelling to North America. Instead, he will be training ahead of the clay season that begins in April.
“After Doha and maybe Dubai, (Federer) will go back and do a training block to continue to slowly work his way back out on tour,” Godsick wrote in an email.
Federer, who will turn 40 in August, has been absent from the Tour for more than a year due to a right knee injury. In 2020 he underwent two surgical procedures on his knee with the second taking place after the first failed to produce the desired results. The last time he played a match on the Tour was at the Australian Open last year where he lost in the semi-finals to Novak Djokovic.
The eagerly awaited return of Federer will commence next week at the Qatar Open in Doha where Federer is set to be the second seed behind Dominic Thiem. His fitness trainer Pierre Paganini recently told the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger that he is cautiously optimistic about the upcoming comeback.
“He trains practically normally. If you could see him, you would say: he is not injured, everything is fine,” said Paganini.
“But we must not forget only when all the stages are finished does reactivity begin to work. This is very important in tennis. We’ve been working on that for a long time, and that’s where you can see if the puzzle works, in all its variants. That’s where we are now. This is good for him because it took an incredible amount of patience to get to this point. It’s crazy thinking about all this.“
Federer has won 103 ATP titles so far in his career. On Monday his record of spending 310 weeks as world No.1 was equalled by Djokovic.
