A difficult three-set loss in the hot, humid conditions at the China Open would make any player crave a shower, and Maria Timofeeva felt the same. However, when the 22-year-old came out, the loss on court was not the only bad news of the day for her. She noticed that her watch was missing from the locker-room area, leaving her understandably upset, especially since this is not the first time such an incident has happened to the Uzbek player.

“Getting my watch stolen from the locker room at a 1000 event wasn’t on my bingo card this year, but at this point, I’m accepting my fate of being a victim of all kinds of thefts as my part-time hobby,” said Timofeeva on her Instagram story. “Another lesson to not leave your tennis bag outside of a locker even for 10 mins while you take a shower. @chinaopen definitely not how I wanted to end my day yesterday after losing a three-set match.”

The Instagram story was later deleted, as Timofeeva gave an encouraging update.

“After my short time story yesterday about my watch being stolen in Beijing – the issue has been resolved, so I’m very sorry to cause any mess and misunderstanding in this situation, the tournament has been nothing but cooperative and helpful with me as soon as I addressed the issue. Some stories do have happy ends and this is one of them,” she wrote in another story.

Timofeeva has previously dealt with two major theft-related incidents. In April 2024, after losing in Madrid qualifying, a then 20-year-old Timofeeva told followers: “Here I am back in Spain six months later and I’ve been robbed again”. She said the card stayed with her except for when she left it in her hotel room during cleaning, and that the confirmation codes normally sent to her phone never arrived. Her bank, she said, had limited ways to contact her and could not block the debit card until more than €10,000 had been spent, including €10,000 in a single day.

Then, in May this year, hours after a loss in French Open qualifying to María Lourdes Carlé (6-2, 0-6, 4-6), a match in which she hurt her knee and later cramped, she wrote: “New city-new robbery”. A bag holding her passport, phone and personal things had been stolen. “In daylight in one of the biggest cities in Europe you can’t leave anything out of sight even for half a minute,” she said, adding that she did not care about the material side of it as much as losing the phone’s memories.

There is also an unfortunate pattern to the theft-related incidents Timofeeva has experienced: her two confirmed previous episodes came after losses on court. This time, too, Naomi Osaka, the 12th seed, needed 2 hours and 4 minutes to beat Timofeeva 6-3, 3-6, 6-3.

The Uzbek was playing her first China Open main draw after losing in qualifying to Greet Minnen a year earlier. She had opened the week by beating Darja Vidmanova 6-3, 6-3. Against Osaka, she lost the first set, then won five straight games in the second, closing it with back-to-back aces. In the decider, Osaka ran to 5-0, and Timofeeva answered with three games of her own before eventually bowing out.

The theft incident and the loss must have dampened her mood more this time around, especially considering that the 22-year-old entered Beijing on the back of having won a Challenger event in Porto, her third title on the Challenger Tour this season, with prior wins in Istanbul and Makarska. Earlier in the year, Timofeeva had also won an ITF title at the Chiasso Open in Switzerland.

That said, watch theft has its own history in tennis. In April 2023, Grigor Dimitrov had a Swiss Bianchet watch snatched from his wrist in Barcelona, days before the Barcelona Open. It was worth around €70,000, and reports at the time described motorbike thieves who pulled him into a trap by knocking his mirror.

Hotel rooms have also not been immune from theft either, even for high-profile players such as Rafael Nadal. During the 2012 French Open, the Spaniard won his seventh title on Parisian clay, but that did not deter thieves from entering his hotel room and stealing his Richard Mille watch, which the brand had given him to wear during his run at Roland Garros.

Another time, a Richard Mille watch was again at the center of it all when American pro Sebastian Korda was robbed in 2024. Having arrived for the Monte-Carlo Masters, the former World No. 15 was attacked by two individuals, who reportedly restrained him before taking his watch, and his watch, worth over $300,000, was taken.