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开场白：

Welcome to this weekend edition!

The sun finally comes out and you can smell the freshness of spring in the air. Meanwhile, the temperature has risen from low teens to mid 20s. Spring is here.

As many of us are still struggling with the covid spread and confiding ourselves at home, we just need some boost, spiritually.

So today, I am sharing an article about the super Tennis star Naomi Osaka. Her recent comeback may bring some much needed positive spirit that the city, Shanghai, really needs.

Go Ahead, Count Naomi Osaka Out

第一部分：（1:04")

Naomi Osaka doesn’t usually follow pretournament chatter before she hits the court, but last month was an exception. One evening she heard a former rival of hers, Caroline Wozniacki, analyzing the lineup for the Miami Open on TV and predicting who would advance.

Wozniacki’s picks assumed that Osaka would lose her next match.

The assessment was fair, given Osaka’s struggles lately. The 24-year-old’s extremely public unraveling since disclosing mental health challenges and withdrawing from the French Open last spring has been excruciating to watch. In the past year, Osaka fell from the top-ranked women’s tennis player in the world to 85th. She hadn’t made a final since early 2021. You don’t have to care about tennis to empathize with an extraordinarily talented person struggling to rally her way out of a world-class hole.

But, by Osaka’s own account, Wozniacki’s dismissal of her chances may have been just the jolt she needed. In her next match, on March 24, she soundly defeated her opponent, Angelique Kerber, qualifying for the semifinals.

After the match, Osaka attributed her success in part to Wozniacki’s slight: “I was kind of thinking about it in my head a lot during when I was playing just now,” she told reporters. “I don’t really say I had, like, a vendetta, but I was like, ‘Hm, I know I was kind of underachieving these last couple of months, but I still feel like I’m a pretty good player.’”

And she found that she was ready to prove it. So it turns out that Wozniacki gave Osaka a powerful gift: She underestimated her. Osaka’s breakthrough shows how being counted out can serve as rocket fuel for performance.

You’re probably familiar with the advice to think positively and visualize your success, while a fear of failure is generally seen as a negative mind-set. In its most extreme form, it’s known as atychiphobia. But sometimes playing with your back against the wall can be remarkably freeing. The only way out is up.

This isn’t to say that harsh criticism is a good way to spur someone to achieve. In Osaka’s case, her performance in Miami was a marked departure from just a couple of weeks before, when she was brought to tears at the Indian Wells tournament in California by a heckler who screamed, “Naomi, you suck!” She lost in the second round.

第二部分：（4:28")

Maybe, based on our performance, the critic has a point. But we don’t have to let that person be right. Once we see the disconnect between our potential and our performance, it’s up to us to channel the power of the underdog effect and fight back, to prove where we belong.

That’s what Osaka did at Miami. After her rally there, she catapulted ahead 42 slots in the global rankings, to 35th. She made her first final in a year. That’s where she lost, to 20-year-old Iga Swiatek.

Still, Osaka was back. And as she told reporters after the match, she has her sights set on reclaiming the top spot. “It feels kind of good to chase something,” she said. “That’s a feeling that I have been missing.”

EP17 五分钟英语-Weekend Edition III 05:35 Share

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Shownotes Transcript

EP17 五分钟英语-Weekend Edition III