She’s gone from hitting the court to pushing a cart.
Tennis star Naomi Osaka, who abruptly withdrew from the French Open amid a battle with depression and anxiety, stepped out Wednesday for a trip to a Los Angeles supermarket, photos obtained by The Post show.
Wearing a bright orange hat, matching pants, a Mulan t-shirt and a blue facemask, Osaka strolled into the store after arriving in her white Nissan GT-R Nismo.
While other luminaries of the sport battled it out on the clay courts of Roland-Garros, the 23-year-old star was on her own, pushing a shopping cart and at one point holding some potatoes in her hand as if she were holding tennis balls before a serve.
After checking out the store’s produce and dairy sections, Osaka checked out and headed back to her car.
Osaka seemed primed for a deep run in the Open’s women’s bracket after a handy first-round win over Patricia Maria Tig on Sunday.
But she declined to address the media after the match, keeping a pre-tournament vow to skip press conferences to protect her mental health.
When the French Open slapped Osaka with a $15,000 fine and threatened to boot her if she kept up the media boycott, she withdrew from the tournament voluntarily on Monday.
“I think now the best thing for the tournament, the others players and my well-being is that I withdraw so that everyone can get back to focusing on the tennis going on in Paris,” Osaka wrote in part in a Monday tweet. “I never wanted to be a distraction and I accept that my timing was not ideal and my message could have been clearer.
“More importantly I would never trivialize mental health or use the term lightly. The truth is that I have suffered long bouts of depression since the US Open in 2018 and I have had a really hard time coping with that,” she continued. “So here in Paris I was already feeling vulnerable and anxious, so I thought it was better to exercise self-care and skip the press conferences.”
