one of the crazier speculations I heard was that Genie lost too much weight this year in an attempt to get faster, and thus also lost a bunch of her baseline power.
I dunno how much sheer bulk adds to your hitting strength in tennis, I always thought it was more about technique, flexibility an leverage (length). why she would feel the need to be faster anyways is strange, since she played a lot of good defense last year. in fact, the big hitting women's champions often don't have to play a ton of defense at all because they're too busy ragdolling their opponents with titanic forehands.
on the WTA side, it does seem like you need to be 6+ feet tall with the ability to blast the other player off the court to have a chance at a major. all the other smaller, much more cerebral players (e.g. Halep, Radwanksa) just can't come up with a game plan to get around the Serenapova buzzsaw.
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