The 36-year-old tennis champ will make her last Grand Slam appearance in Australia Open in January.
Sania Mirza, India's former world number one doubles player, has announced that she will retire at the age of 36 after next month's Dubai Tennis Championships, after her 2022 retirement plans were pushed back owing to injuries.
Mirza, widely regarded as her country's finest female tennis player, has six Grand Slam doubles titles to her name and will compete in her final major this month at the Australian Open, where she won the women's doubles title in 2016.
"I was going to stop right after the WTA Finals because we were going to make the WTA Finals, but I tore my tendon in my elbow right before U.S. Open, so I had to pull out of everything," Mirza told the WTA Tour's website in an interview published on Friday.
Mirza had planned to retire at the end of the 2022 season due to a longstanding calf issue, but an elbow injury in August forced her to withdraw from the U.S. Open.
"Honestly, the person that I am, I like to do things on my own terms. So I don't want to be forced out by injury. So I've been training," she added.
Mirza became the first Indian woman to win a WTA singles title in 2005, when she won in her hometown of Hyderabad. By 2007, she had broken into the top 30 and was ranked 27th in the world.
Mirza formed a doubles combination with Swiss star Martina Hingis after being afflicted by a chronic, career-threatening wrist ailment. Wimbledon, as well as the US and Australian Opens, were among the 14 trophies won by the self-styled "Santina" team.
Mirza will participate alongside Kazakhstan's Anna Danilina at the Australian Open, which begins on January 16, before saying goodbye to tennis in the United Arab Emirates, where she has lived for more than a decade with her husband, former Pakistan cricketer Shoaib Malik.
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