{"id":108134,"date":"2026-07-08T23:04:21","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T03:04:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/?p=108134"},"modified":"2026-07-08T23:04:49","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T03:04:49","slug":"will-naomi-osaka-ever-win-a-grand-slam-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2026\/07\/08\/will-naomi-osaka-ever-win-a-grand-slam-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Naomi Osaka Ever Win a Grand Slam Again?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span>Naomi Osaka lost to Karolina Muchova in the Wimbledon quarterfinal in straight sets and walked off the All England Club grass having produced the best 2 weeks of her career on the surface. She had beaten the world No. 1 in the round of 16. She had not dropped a set until Muchova dismantled her with slice, net approaches, and the variety that disrupts a flat ball-striker more than any other game style available. The run might have ended but the questions it generated did not.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The question that <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2026\/07\/06\/can-osaka-win-wimbledon\/\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_self\">Wimbledon<\/a> 2026 has forced back into the open is the one that has followed Naomi Osaka since she returned from maternity leave in early 2024: can she win another Grand Slam? She has 4. She won them all before she turned 24. She is now 28, ranked 14th in the world, and carrying a body of work since her last major title in January 2021 that until recently made the question feel rhetorical. After this Wimbledon, it no longer does.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><span>The Years in Between<\/span><\/h3>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Naomi Osaka : Skills Moments\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/H9Lu81p1JXQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span>The period between Osaka&#8217;s 2021 Australian Open title and the present moment is one of the most complicated chapters any top athlete has navigated in recent memory. She withdrew from Roland Garros in 2021 citing mental health reasons, skipped Wimbledon, and lost in the third round of the US Open. She reached the Australian Open quarterfinal in 2022. She withdrew from Wimbledon for the second year running, played 1 tournament in September 2022, and then took a 15-month break to give birth to her daughter Shai in July 2023.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>She came back in early 2024 and the return was, to be honest about it, difficult to watch at times. She retired in the third round of the Australian Open with an abdominal injury. She lost in the first round of Madrid and went down to a WTA 125 event in France, her first appearance below Tour-level since 2015. She reached a quarterfinal at the grass court event in &#8216;s-Hertogenbosch, which was her first grass match in 5 years. Her former coach Wim Fissette had identified her growing aversion to playing outside of hard courts in those years, noting that if you see the last 4 years she almost didn&#8217;t play on the grass or clay courts and it was only going to get more difficult. The physical confidence in her movement on natural surfaces had been eroded first by injury and then by absence.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Throughout most of 2024, the honest assessment was that Naomi Osaka would not win another Grand Slam, because the whole apparatus of competing at that level had been interrupted for too long and in too many ways simultaneously. A 4-time major champion who could not reliably get through a full tournament without retiring was not, at that stage, a player whose Grand Slam credentials could be taken seriously on merit.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><span>What Changed and Why It Matters<\/span><\/h3>\n<p><span>The <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2025\/11\/13\/naomi-osaka-in-2025-a-year-of-rediscovery\/\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_self\">2025 season<\/a> was where the trajectory genuinely shifted. She won her first title since the 2021 Australian Open at the WTA 125 in Saint-Malo on clay, which was not a glamorous result but was a psychologically significant one. She reached the Montreal final, her first WTA 1000 final since returning, beating opponents of genuine quality along the way. She reached the US Open semifinal, her best result at a major since 2021, and climbed back inside the top 20 for the first time in over 3 years. The movement on natural surfaces, which Fissette had flagged as the primary obstacle to her development on anything other than hard courts, was recovering as her trust in her own body after childbirth slowly rebuilt.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>In 2026, the improvement has been structural rather than episodic. Her combined win-loss record of 14-4 on clay and grass this season is, by a considerable distance, the best of her career on those surfaces. She reached the 4th round at Indian Wells, Madrid, and Rome. She reached her first WTA final on grass in Bad Homburg. The coaching partnership with Tomasz Wiktorowski has produced something her previous arrangements could not: a version of Naomi Osaka who attacks the full court rather than retreating to the comfort of hard-court conditions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The Wimbledon run was the cleanest expression of that development. She beat Anastasia Gasanova, Daria Kasatkina and Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 1, without dropping a set.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><span>Why the Honest Answer Is Still Probably Not<\/span><\/h3>\n<p><span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wtatennis.com\/news\/4532083\/muchova-outlasts-osaka-to-complete-grand-slam-semifinal-set-at-wimbledon\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Muchova&#8217;s win<\/a> was not an upset and should not be packaged as one. Muchova is a player specifically equipped to neutralise Osaka&#8217;s game, and the quarterfinal confirmed that the progress Osaka has made across 2025 and 2026 still has a ceiling in the current form of elite players. Osaka&#8217;s record against top-10 opponents stands at 15-29 for her career, and while the Sabalenka win this week was real and significant, the Muchova loss equally confirmed that the consistency required to win 7 consecutive matches against top opposition at a major has not yet been demonstrated in this phase of her career.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Her hard-court results in 2026 have been less impressive than her clay and grass numbers, which is a slightly counterintuitive finding given her career profile. She withdrew from the Australian Open in the 3rd round with an abdominal injury and has not produced a hard-court result this year that suggests she is at peak level on the surface where she has historically been most dangerous. The US Open will be the next meaningful data point. If she arrives there with the same form she brought to Wimbledon, the conversation changes considerably.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><span>Where That Leaves Her<\/span><\/h3>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"max-width: 1280px\"><smartframe-embed class=\"smartframe_wp_element\" customer-id=\"a61405551f80e72f675225f083759bb9\" image-id=\"fwuQR8E236PF\" style=\"width: 100%; display: inline-flex; max-width: 6000px; aspect-ratio: 6000\/4000;\" ><\/smartframe-embed><\/p>\n<p><span>A year ago, asking whether Naomi Osaka would win another Grand Slam felt like asking a question that politeness prevented most analysts from answering honestly. The honest answer then was almost certainly no. The talent had not disappeared, but the fitness, the consistency, the willingness to play on surfaces that made her uncomfortable, had been disrupted to the point where a return to the summit looked implausible.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Today the honest answer is different. It is still probably not. Sinner and Alcaraz on the men&#8217;s side have separated themselves from the field in a way that makes their major titles feel almost inevitable, but on the women&#8217;s side, the distributed randomness of results across the last 6 major cycles means that a player in Osaka&#8217;s current form is a genuine participant in the conversation rather than a sentimental footnote to it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>She is 28, ranked 14th, and carrying a grass court record in 2026 that nobody would have predicted 18 months ago. The honest assessment of Naomi Osaka in 2026 goes like this: not there yet, clearly closer than she has been in a very long time, and for the first time since returning, genuinely worth watching at the majors that matter most.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Main Photo Credit: Mike Frey-Imagn Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Naomi Osaka lost to Karolina Muchova in the Wimbledon quarterfinal in straight sets and walked off the All England Club grass having produced the best 2 weeks of her career on the surface. She had beaten the world No. 1 in the round of 16. She had not dropped a set until Muchova dismantled her [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5393,"featured_media":92040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,15913,6,4],"tags":[3858,3716,476,21,15,364],"class_list":["post-108134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-opinion","category-wimbledon","category-wta","tag-japanese-tennis","tag-karolina-muchova","tag-naomi-osaka","tag-wimbledon","tag-wta","tag-wta-tour"],"modified_by":"Steen Kirby","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5393"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108134"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":108149,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108134\/revisions\/108149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}