At a press conference at the French tournament, Marta Kostyuk spoke bluntly about growing up in artistic gymnastics, saying the sport left both physical benefits and lasting costs. "It helped me a lot physically, but I also had to deal with many consequences later because it is an extremely strict sport," she told reporters.
Kostyuk described the discipline around diet and weight that came with elite gymnastics from a very young age. "From a very young age, I had to monitor my weight and food intake a lot," she said, and then offered a stark image of how extreme that monitoring became: "I used to weigh myself twenty or thirty times a day when I was eight or ten, and that had significant mental repercussions."
She also recounted a serious physical setback from her childhood. "I also suffered a very serious injury when I was young, and all of that took me a long time to overcome," Kostyuk said, framing those years as part of a difficult run she has only recently begun to move past.
On court, Kostyuk has tried to channel those experiences into performance. Crowned champion in Madrid earlier this season, she has presented herself as a top candidate for success in Roland Garros 2026. That claim sits beside an uneven recent record at majors: she failed to advance past the first round in three of her last Grand Slams, a string of early exits that tempers expectations even as her Madrid win raises them.
The friction is clear. The same early training she credits with helping her physically also left "significant mental repercussions" and a serious injury that required a long recovery. That history helps explain why a Madrid title does not automatically translate into Grand Slam consistency; it also makes her run at Roland Garros 2026 a storyline about recovery as much as about form.
Kostyuk said the process of getting through those years was lengthy and difficult, but she made a point of where she stands now. "However, today I feel like I am in a much better place and I am grateful to have gone through that experience," she said, closing the account on a note of resilience as she heads toward the clay of Roland Garros 2026.
