FERNANDEZ TRANSFORMED: FROM UNDERDOG TO A STAR OF HER SPORT
CANADIAN TEEN’S MARCH TO THE FINAL OF THE U.S. OPEN CHANGES EVERYTHING IN HER LIFE
There could not be two Cinderellas in the end. Leylah Fernandez’s remarkable run at the U.S. Open ended on Saturday when the Canadian teenager was beaten in the final by the tournament’s other upstart performer, British 18-yearold Emma Raducanu.
Toronto-born Raducanu, who moved to London with her Chinese and Romanian parents when she was two years old, was just a little bit better in the first-ever major final between two unseeded players, closing out the match on her third championship point with an ace to win in straight sets (6-4, 6-3). A tense, tight match ended with a touch of drama, as Raducanu needed a medical timeout to deal with a cut on her leg in the final game when she was about to face a break point and Fernandez had all the momentum. The knee repaired, she was able to save the break point and won the match a few points later.
“I honestly don’t know what to say,” Fernandez, the 19-year-old from Montreal, said when it was over. I’m very proud of myself the way I’ve played the last two weeks,” she said. “Thank you, New York, thank you, everyone.”
“I hope we play each other in many more tournaments and hopefully in finals,” said Raducanu, who became the first singles player — man or woman — to win a Grand Slam after going through the qualifying rounds. Ranked 150th on the WTA tour before the tournament, she won all 10 matches, three in qualifying and seven in the main draw, in straight sets. Never has such a thing happened before.
Having played four consecutive three-set matches to get to the final, Fernandez appeared to have lost just a bit of her usual energy. She struggled to get her first serve in play, landing just 50 per cent of them in the first set, but still managed to hang around thanks to her deep reserves of guile and poise. She dropped the first two games of the opening set, but instead of going down quickly she fought right back to level the set, only dropping it when Raducanu ripped a couple of beautiful forehands in the 10th game. The Canadian then took the lead in the second set, but Raducanu, who was ranked 338th in the world before reaching the fourth round at Wimbledon in July, was able to eke out the set and the win in the end.
“I want to say that I hope to be back here in the finals and I want to be with the trophy,” Fernandez said. “The right one,” she added with a laugh.
She also said, on the anniversary of 9/11, that she hoped to be as strong and resilient as New York had been the last 20 years — a statement that brought a huge roar from the packed Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd.
Before a ball was hit on Saturday, it had already been a tournament for Fernandez for which there really aren’t enough positive adjectives. It wasn’t just that she had beaten three topfive seeds — Naomi Osaka, Elina Svitolina and Aryna Sabalenka — in the space of a week, plus a former U.S. Open champion and world No. 1 in Angelique Kerber, it was the way in which she beat them.
Every one of those matches went to three sets, and there were moments in each in which the Canadian’s higher ranked, more experienced opponents had seized control. These were the instances in which it would have been utterly normal for an unseeded teenager who had never gone deep in a Slam before to go down quietly.
But Fernandez just wouldn’t let it happen. Most importantly, she didn’t make mistakes, or at least not many of them, at the exact moments where you would expect someone of her limited experience and age to make them. Osaka, Svitonlina and Sabalenka all had clear moments of exasperation. Osaka and Sabalenka smashed at least three rackets out of frustration between them.
Most remarkable about all of that is that Fernandez, at this point in her young career, had shown no indication that she was about to become a giant-killing menace. She was a promising talent, and she was in the middle of a fine first full season at the top level of the WTA tour. But she was 13-12 in 2021 before arriving in New York, and was 5-8 since the beginning of April. Her run at the U.S. Open naturally invites comparisons to that of Bianca Andreescu two years ago, but by the time Andreescu came to Flushing Meadows that season she had already won in Indian Wells and Toronto and was shooting up the WTA rankings. She was 32-5 that season before the U.S. Open, and two of those losses were injury retirements. Fernandez didn’t have any of that buzz.
So, what now? She is now one of the stars of the sport. Her family had talked about the financial struggles of supporting her elite training, and now she has a cheque of more than US$1.2 million to show for it, almost 10 times what she had previously earned in her pro career.
The world has changed for Leylah Fernandez with a storybook run that is almost too crazy to be true. No one who watched her believes it will be her last.