Emil Ruusuvuori: is this the bravest man in tennis?

Emil Ruusuvuori is one of the bravest tennis players in the history of the game. In fact it’s possible the likeable Finn may prove to have revolutionised the way young people aiming for the top approach the delicate subject of mental health.

Finland has produced some outstanding international athletes, notably in ice hockey, skiing, athletics and motor sport, but world-class tennis players have been rare. Jarkko Nieminen reached a career-high ranking of 13 in 2006, and Henri Kontinen became the first Finn to claim a Grand Slam main draw title when he won the 2017 Australian Open men’s doubles alongside John Peers.

When Ruusuvuori reached the semi-final of the US Open boys’ singles in 2017, he was hailed as a great prospect. When he broke into the top 100 in late 2020 at age 21, he was the hope of Finnish tennis, and when he broke the top 40 in April 2023, all the hype around the boy from Töölö just outside Helsinki was proving justified.

But Ruusuvuori was carrying a secret he was desperately trying to keep to himself: he was suffering with his mental health. In an admirably honest article for the ATP in 2025, he said, “When it was bad, I started to forget things. My body was in one place, but my mind was somewhere else. It would go from something as simple as nearly forgetting my racquets to suffering panic attacks. I could not sleep well to the point that I started having nightmares. I would wake up sweating with my heart pounding, and I couldn’t breathe. It made me think I was going crazy.”

The panic attacks were mostly off-court, but occasionally they happened during a match. He still won many of them, but he knew it couldn’t go on. One day, he arrived at a tournament shaking, barely able to speak. Through tears, he told his coach that he was not OK, and he had to acknowledge his problems. After pulling out of the Montreal Masters in August 2024, he took the rest of the year off, not even touching a racquet, and seeing a psychologist weekly. He returned to the tour in early 2025, and in May produced a video in Finnish and spoke to the ATP about his struggles.

“I told my very close family and friends what I was dealing with, which helped. One of my closest friends went through something similar, which made me realise I was not alone in this. That gave me perspective. When the video was released, it was like a weight dropped off my shoulders, because I felt like I was always pretending in front of people.”

A different sort of racquet

Ruusuvuori was playing badminton in a sports hall with his mother when he was spotted by a tennis coach who suggested the five-year-old should try a different sort of racquet. Having taken quickly to tennis, Ruusuvuori enjoyed a fine junior career, and then in 2019 he won four Challenger titles in five months, including one in his home city of Helsinki. “It was amazing to win the tournament which was organised by my own tennis club, HVS-Tennis,” he said at the time. “My whole family, parents, sister and brother were here every day and also a lot of friends.”

That led to an invitation to the Rafael Nadal tennis academy on Mallorca to do his off-season training, including hitting with Nadal. “It’s something really different, the way he hits the ball and how he keeps the practice so intense,” Ruusuvuori said of the experience. “It’s something I’d never experienced and it’s one of the best memories I have on the tennis court.”

The following year, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced a five-month break to the global tennis circuit, Ruusuvuori was stranded one place outside the world’s top 100 at 101. But when the tour resumed, he was straight into double digits, and in 2022 he reached his first tour final in Pune, India. A second final followed in 2024 in Hong Kong, and he reached the third round at Wimbledon that year, the furthest he has yet gone in a major.

Flying the Finnish flag

One of his most satisfying wins came when he was still a teenager. Playing for Finland against Austria in Helsinki, Russuvuori beat Dominic Thiem in straight sets in a Davis Cup tie. “It was the best day of my career,” he said, but it was also a way of thanking his national captain, Jarkko Nieminen. Nieminen has been a significant figure for Ruusuvuori, who grew up idolising the player who has won more Davis Cup rubbers than any other Finn. At 13, Ruusuvuori went to train at the Helsinki academy which Nieminen founded in partnership with the Italian Federico Ricci.

Ricci has been Ruusuvuori’s coach for more than a decade, and talked in 2020 about how Ruusuvuori has had to learn a different mental approach to what comes naturally to most Finns. “They are relaxed people, quite chilled,” Ricci said. “It takes time to build a mentality. Finland has not had many successful tennis players, so sometimes you have people around you who talk but don’t really know what they’re talking about.” Given that Finland has a population of less than six million people, there’s also a lot of pressure on national icons like Ruusuvuori.

Ruusovuori is back on the tour, but has a long way to get back to the top 40. He still has panic attacks, but now has more tools to calm himself down. And he is happy to have broken the silence about professional tennis players talking about mental health.

“I was able to make my dream come true and become a tennis player,” he said in his ATP article. “Because I achieved that goal, I had the mindset that I should just do whatever it took to keep moving forward. I didn’t really talk about any mental problems because I saw them as a weakness. That’s maybe the key word. It was something I felt didn’t exist in sports and allowing anyone to see me vulnerable was showing that I was not strong enough.

“If my story helps even one person, then it will be worth it. If you’re not OK, there is no more important thing than helping yourself.”

Emil Ruusuvuori endorses racquets from HEAD’s Speed range.

Words by Paul Newman and Chris Bowers