No simple answer behind Canadian tennis success
Daniel Nestor sat across the table in a small interview room at the All-England Lawn and Tennis Club and said it was kind of surreal to witness the rise of Canadian tennis.
When he won his eight Grand Slam doubles titles, the first in 2002 and the last a decade later, he did it largely out of the Canadian eye. He won more than 1,000 doubles matches, few of which were televised here. Canada didn't produce great singles players, and tennis was a bit of an afterthought.
“We're a tennis nation now,” Nestor told me.
That was six years ago.
And if Canada's tennis ascendance still took a little getting used to in 2015, with the deep Grand Slam runs of Eugenie Bouchard and the sustained success of Milos Raonic, it has become suddenly old hat now.
Felix Auger-Aliassime advanced to the U.S. Open semifinals on Tuesday night when his teenage Spanish opponent, Carlos Alcarez, retired with a leg injury while down a set and a break in the second set. Auger-Aliassime, still just 21 but one of the sport's most promising stars for years now, joins fellow Montrealer Leylah Fernandez in the semis at Flushing Meadows, giving Canada two players among the final eight in singles play.
Fernandez, who just turned 19 on Monday, is the fourth Canadian to make a long run at a Grand Slam tourney in recent history. Denis Shapovalov advanced to the semis in Wimbledon in July before losing to Novak Djokovic and Bianca Andreescu won the U.S. Open in 2019, defeating American legend Serena Williams in an unforgettable final.
As American tennis legend and TV analyst John McEnroe put it recently, “What's with Canada?
“They're hockey players! They're not tennis players.”
Fernandez was asked a similar question about the secret to Canada's success after her victory over fifth-ranked Elina Svitolina on Tuesday, and she joked that it must be all the maple syrup, which if nothing else should immediately secure her a syrup endorsement deal.
But the reality is that there's not a simple answer to “What's with Canada?”
The example set by Raonic and Bouchard in the previous decade certainly served as something of an inspiration for the players who have followed them. Raonic, 30, though beset by injury in recent seasons, reached third in the ATP rankings in 2016, the highest ever for a Canadian, after he made it to the Wimbledon final. Bouchard, 27, also made it to a Slam final a couple of years earlier, and while she didn't have the sustained results of Raonic, she was briefly one of the biggest stars in the sport before struggling with both form and injuries.
Pam Shriver, the former player and current television analyst, said before the U.S. Open that someone like Fernandez would benefit from being from a country like Canada “where there are compatriots who are also leading the way.”
“That's one of the things that's been lacking on the U.S. men's side,” Shriver said. “You need somebody to really raise the bar. That's happened in Canada in recent years on both the men's and women's side.”
It's not just an inspiration thing, though. Tennis Canada began pouring millions of dollars into developing its high-performance program more than a decade ago, with Raonic one of the first young players to take part in training at the national centre in Montreal.
But more than anything, the reason that Canada is making such noise on the tennis stage is that the athletes themselves are simply performing at a very high level.
Auger-Aliassime has been on the verge of a breakthrough forever, but hasn't quite mastered that last step.
They're a fascinating bunch, these Canadians.
Could these players, these Canadians, one day meet each other in tournament finals? In Slam finals?
We have years to find out.