Emma Navarro won her first WTA Tour title in Hobart in January 2024. What she remembers most clearly about that week is wanting to destroy her equipment.
“I remember feeling deep internal anger on the court that week in Hobart, like I wanted to smash every racket,” the American wrote on Wednesday, in a statement that ended her 2026 season and disclosed a health battle she had kept private throughout her climb into the world’s top 10.
Navarro, 25 and ranked 24th, has been treated since late 2025 for relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S) and for Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism, an autoimmune condition in which the body attacks its own thyroid gland. She will miss the Asian swing and intends to return at the Australian Open in January.
“I gained some weight this year,” she wrote. “But I also gained my life back. I have enough energy to seize every day, to train or compete as hard as I want to, and to live a life outside of tennis.”
Three years of symptoms and 30lb gone
Navarro traces the problem to 2023 — the season she played 88 matches, more than any other professional on either tour, and rose from outside the top 150 to the edge of the top 30.
“Being new to professional tennis, I was doing what my team and I thought was best, and pushing myself to the limit was always my MO,” she wrote.
She lost close to 20lb over that year, then roughly another 10lb across 2024. The symptoms stacked up:
- constant hunger alongside unrelenting fatigue
- headaches, dizziness and brain fog, including difficulty recalling words
- restless sleep and an immune system that stopped holding up
- rashes on her neck and scalp
- irritability, perfectionism and anger — “I was experiencing emotions I had never experienced before, at least not to this severity”
She kept winning through it. A Wimbledon quarter-final and a US Open semi-final in 2024 carried her to a career-high ranking of No. 8. She reached the Australian Open quarter-finals in 2025, a run during which she describes being in tears in the gym, unable to explain why a body she had trained relentlessly would no longer answer. The RED-S diagnosis arrived in November 2025. Hashimoto’s followed.
“My body was screaming at me for years, and I ignored it,” she wrote.
Why this diagnosis matters beyond one player
RED-S describes what happens when an athlete does not take in enough energy to cover training and competition load. The consequences are systemic rather than local: disrupted hormone production, impaired bone health, suppressed immune function, cognitive effects. It is well documented in endurance sport and in gymnastics, and it has been recognised for years in medical literature. It is barely discussed in public by tennis players.
That silence is partly structural. The WTA calendar runs close to 11 months, with players crossing continents between events and eating in hotels and locker rooms. Under-fuelling is easy to do accidentally and easy to mistake for discipline. Navarro’s symptoms also masqueraded as ordinary tour attrition — tiredness, illness, irritability — which is precisely why she was able to post the best results of her career while getting progressively sicker.
Hashimoto’s compounded it. The condition slows metabolism and produces fatigue and cognitive fog, and it is managed with thyroid hormone replacement that has to be titrated patient by patient. That is the work Navarro says she is now doing: “I am taking the rest of this year to work on dialling in my medication and fuelling protocols.”
Her conclusion is the line most likely to be quoted back to younger players: “I have learned that there is no weight on the scale or leanness in your limbs that is more valuable than your health or your well-being.”
What 2026 proved, and what comes next
Navarro finishes the year 25-20. The first two months were the worst of her professional life — nine defeats in her opening 13 matches, then a withdrawal from the Charleston Open at the end of March. What followed suggests the treatment is working rather than merely stabilising her. She won the Strasbourg 500 in May for her third career title, reached the final in Nottingham in June, and made the US Open quarter-finals before losing to Jessica Pegula in three sets.
Stopping now costs her ranking points she cannot replace until 2027, and she will likely drop further from 24th while she is away. That is the straightforward trade: three months of calibration against another season spent guessing.
She returns to Melbourne in January as a player who reached the quarter-finals there in 2025 while unwell, with a diagnosis, a treatment plan and, by her own account, energy she has not had since 2022. On that evidence, the top 10 is a reasonable 2027 target rather than an optimistic one.
Sources: [Yahoo Sports](https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/navarro-opens-health-struggles-caused-184222896.html), [Reuters via KFGO](https://kfgo.com/2026/09/30/tennis-navarro-ends-2026-season-early-reveals-long-running-health-struggles/), [Tennis365](https://www.tennis365.com/tennis-news/emma-navarro-opens-up-serious-health-challenges-2026-season-over), [AOL](https://www.aol.co.uk/articles/tennis-star-emma-navarro-reveals-205733000.html)
**Article is 735 words.** Two sourcing notes: one outlet listed a 2024 Australian Open quarter-final for Navarro while another listed a third round — I used only her Wimbledon 2024 QF, US Open 2024 SF and Australian Open 2025 QF, which are consistent across sources. I also converted the weight figures to pounds (one outlet rendered them as ~14kg, which does not reconcile with the 20lb/10lb figures given elsewhere).
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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