British tennis star Ryan Peniston has said having cancer as a baby has been a “blessing in disguise” for making him “tougher as a player” after winning his debut singles match at Wimbledon . The 26-year-old wildcard was loudly cheered on by his parents, Paul and Penny, from the side-lines of a packed court watching his triumph over Switzerland’s Henri Laaksonen. At the age of one, Peniston was diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma, a tumour near his stomach, which required surgery and chemotherapy before years of regular check-ups. The Essex-born player has previously attributed his late blooming in tennis to battling this as a youngster, as he grew up “a foot smaller than all my peers”. Speaking about his cancer battle during the post-match press conference, Peniston said: “It made me definitely tougher as a player and a person I think. “It’s a blessing in disguise really.” “It’s such a terrible thing to go through, especially for my family, my close friends,”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
British tennis star Ryan Peniston has said having cancer as a baby has been a “blessing in disguise” for making him “tougher as a player” after winning his debut singles<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,70],"tags":[58,71],"class_list":["post-41199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}