PARIS (AP) — Casper Ruud is hardly an up-and-comer simply trying to make his way — and a living — in professional tennis. He's a three-time Grand Slam finalist, ranked No. 8, the owner of more clay-court victories than any other man since 2020 and someone who's earned nearly $25 million in prize money.
And yet Ruud felt the need to play through pain for the better part of two months, right up until the moment the left knee that's been swollen from a build-up of fluid, that's prompted him to pop pills, that's ached every time he slides into an open-stance backhand, became too problematic during a French Open second-round match. He didn't stop, but he did drop 13 of the last 14 games in a loss Wednesday.
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Australia's Alex De Minaur gets medical assistance as he plays Serbia's Laslo Djere during their first round match of the French Tennis Open, at the Roland-Garros stadium, in Paris, Tuesday, May 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
France's Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, left, looks at Bosnia and Herzegovina's Damir Dzumhur lying on the court after falling, during their second round match of the French Tennis Open, at the Roland-Garros stadium, in Paris, Wednesday, May 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Bosnia and Herzegovina's Damir Dzumhur grimaces in pain after falling during his second round match of the French Tennis Open against France's Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, at the Roland-Garros stadium, in Paris, Wednesday, May 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
France's Caroline Garcia reacts as she plays United States' Bernarda Pera during their first round match of the French Tennis Open, at the Roland-Garros stadium, in Paris, Monday, May 26, 2025. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)
Norway's Casper Ruud wipes his face as he plays Portugal's Nuno Borges during their second round match of the French Tennis Open, at the Roland-Garros stadium, in Paris, Wednesday, May 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Afterward, the 26-year-old Norwegian voiced concerns, also expressed this week by other players, that there is an overwhelming sense of obligation to take the court as often as possible, no matter one's health, thanks to a schedule and a system Ruud called a “rat race.”
“You feel like you lose a lot if you don’t show up and play, both economically, point-wise, ranking-wise and opportunity-wise,” Ruud said, noting that skipping one mandatory event brings a 25% cut to a year-end bonus on the men's tour. “You’re kind of forcing players to show up injured or sick.”
Caroline Garcia, a 2022 U.S. Open semifinalist who announced this is her last season as a pro, wrote in a social media post that she relied on a steady diet of anti-inflammatories, corticoid injections and plasma treatments to deal with a bum shoulder.
The 31-year-old from France wondered aloud: “Is it truly worth pushing our bodies to such extremes?” She spoke in Paris about the stresses of trying to maintain one's ranking and “the responsibility” of performing for one's entourage.
“I can feel what she feels,” said Alexander Zverev, a three-time major runner-up. “The thing is, with us tennis players, it’s a 1-on-1 sport, so we get the blame all the time, right?”
Ajla Tomljanovic, who handed Serena Williams the last loss of her career, summed it up this way: “I don't think playing with pain is smart, but I’ve done it before. Sometimes it was rewarded, and sometimes it wasn’t.”
Emma Raducanu, the 2021 U.S. Open champion, said she kept entering tournaments a couple of seasons ago despite problems in both wrists that required surgery.
People around her at the time, Raducanu said, “were telling me I wasn’t tough enough, like I need to just work through it, like it’s normal I’m feeling fatigued because I’m training so much. When in reality, I knew there was pain, and I knew it kind of felt more than just soreness. So I wish I would have listened to myself sooner.”
Australian Open champion Madison Keys said Garcia’s post resonated.
“She’s right. At some point, you just have to say, ‘I’m done.’ And like she said, it’s something that we learn from a really young age,” Keys said. “Everyone applauds (NBA star Michael) Jordan for playing with the flu ... and somehow it was a better achievement because he pushed through it. Obviously, it was incredible that he was able to do that while ill, but I don’t think you always need to."
On Wednesday, Tommy Paul, an American seeded 12th in Paris, wasn’t quite sure what was wrong in his lower abdominal area, but he knew it didn’t feel right during his second-round match. He was visited by a trainer, who couldn't do much to help. Paul played on, wound up winning in five sets, and planned to get an MRI exam Thursday.
“I’m going back out to play," Paul said, "for sure.”
In another match, Damir Džumhur of Bosnia tumbled to the clay, hurting his knee. He, too, continued, won to set up a showdown with defending champion Carlos Alcaraz, and declared: “If it’s just a bruise — if I cannot make it worse — then I can play.”
Tennis is a non-contact sport, of course, so the perils are not the same as in the NFL, say. Still, Ruud estimated something is physically wrong with him in more than half his matches — “whether that’s just a small blister under your foot or maybe a little soreness in your stomach, rib, back, knee, whatever."
“Every part of my body,” he said, "has felt some kind of pain.”
Australia's Alex De Minaur gets medical assistance as he plays Serbia's Laslo Djere during their first round match of the French Tennis Open, at the Roland-Garros stadium, in Paris, Tuesday, May 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
France's Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, left, looks at Bosnia and Herzegovina's Damir Dzumhur lying on the court after falling, during their second round match of the French Tennis Open, at the Roland-Garros stadium, in Paris, Wednesday, May 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Bosnia and Herzegovina's Damir Dzumhur grimaces in pain after falling during his second round match of the French Tennis Open against France's Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, at the Roland-Garros stadium, in Paris, Wednesday, May 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
France's Caroline Garcia reacts as she plays United States' Bernarda Pera during their first round match of the French Tennis Open, at the Roland-Garros stadium, in Paris, Monday, May 26, 2025. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)
Norway's Casper Ruud wipes his face as he plays Portugal's Nuno Borges during their second round match of the French Tennis Open, at the Roland-Garros stadium, in Paris, Wednesday, May 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
