Naomi Osaka Announces She Is Pregnant and Won’t Play in 2023

The tennis player Naomi Osaka, a four-time Grand Slam winner, announced on Wednesday that she is pregnant.

She posted a photograph of an ultrasound on Instagram, and added, “One thing I’m looking forward to is for my kid to watch one of my matches and tell someone, ‘that’s my mom.’ Ha ha.”

She said in the post that she would be at the 2024 Australian Open.

Three days ago, Osaka, 25, dropped out of this year’s Australian Open, which begins Monday. She has not played a tournament since September. Because of the missed time, she is currently ranked No. 47 in the world.

Osaka won the Australian Open in 2019 and 2021. She also won the U.S. Open in 2018 and 2020. She has been involved in a relationship with the rapper Cordae since 2019.

Serena Williams won the 2017 Australian Open while she was roughly two months pregnant. Osaka did not reveal how far along she was in the Instagram post.

Osaka withdrew from the 2021 French Open after declining to attend news conferences, saying that she found them detrimental to her mental health, and she revealed that she had struggled with depression. She took a break from the game and also missed time with an Achilles’ tendon injury last year.

Though she has lived in the United States since she was a toddler, Osaka, whose parents are Haitian American and Japanese, represents Japan and was given the honor of lighting the cauldron to begin the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.

Because of numerous endorsement deals, Osaka is one of the top 20 earning athletes in the world and the highest-paid woman, Forbes has reported.

Her business portfolio includes a skin care products company focused on people with darker skin tones, and she has written a children’s book. Last year, Osaka and her longtime agent, Stuart Duguid, left IMG, the sports and entertainment conglomerate, to begin Evolve, which manages Osaka’s business interests as well as other clients.