The year we discovered BIANCA
Postmedia’s female athlete of 2019 a star on the rise
Last January, Bianca Andreescu entered the qualifiers for the ASB Classic in Auckland, New Zealand, and managed to secure a place in the main draw of the WTA event.
This is often how careers at the top level of tennis begin. Lacking the world ranking status that grants automatic entry into tournaments, athletes have to show up early and try to play their way in. If they pull that off, they will be matched against a top seed in the first round.
It is tough sledding: The qualifiers are full of unproven youngsters or veterans on the fringe of the top 150 in the world, all fighting each other for the right to be bounced out of the first round of the main draw by a top star.
When Andreescu, then an 18-year-old ranked No. 152 in the world, claimed a spot at the ASB Classic, the other three qualifiers were Jana Cepelova, Bibiane Schoofs and Silvia Soler Espinosa. A year later, Cepelova is ranked 158, Schoofs is ranked 168 and Soler Espinosa is ranked 686. Andreescu is ranked fifth. There are any number of ways to quantify the ridiculous year Andreescu had in 2019, starting with her trophy cabinet, which made her the easiest choice in memory for Postmedia’s Female Athlete of the Year. But as a measure of how far she has come in such a short time, look where she was in January. She was an unknown, among peers in the depths of the world rankings.
Like the song lyric from Drake, the hip-hop superstar that Andreescu now casually mentions as a social media friend, she really did start from the bottom.
It did not last long. Andreescu went all the way to the final in Auckland, beating former world No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki and Venus Williams, another player who was once at the top of the rankings, on the way. When she beat Williams, Andreescu said at the time that she thought she “had just done the impossible.” It was a match that would end up well down the list of Andreescu’s improbable, remarkable, year of huge moments.
The average Canadian sports fan is not quite in tune with the rhythms of the tennis calendar. The season begins in earnest on the other side of the world in January, and the matches are in the dead of night here. After that opening splash in New Zealand, Andreescu announced herself in a whole new way at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., in March. It is just a notch below the Grand Slams in terms of prestige and quality of field, and it’s where the Canadian starting rolling in earnest, winning six straight matches to book a place in the final against Angelique Kerber. The German was the defending Wimbledon champion, a former world No. 1 who at the time was ranked fourth in the world. All of her big-match experience, against a rookie Canadian. A mismatch, clearly.
And then Andreescu went out and played the match that started to establish her legend. She was clearly labouring and required medical attention at multiple points. In the deciding third set, after Kerber had just broken her serve, courtside cameras caught her in an intense discussion with her coach, Sylvain Bruneau.
“I can barely move out there,” she said.
He said she was going to have to push through it.
“I want this so bad,” she said. He said he was glad to hear it. Andreescu went back out, bashing winners, and earned her first WTA win.
Chris Evert, the tennis legend and ESPN announcer, said after the match that the exchange between Andreescu and Bruneau was the first time she had heard a WTA player talk so plainly about a desire to win.
“That told me a lot about her. What makes her tick,” Evert said. “This is a very humble and hungry young lady who has a game that is just dynamite.”
Assessments of an athlete’s intangible qualities are always fraught. It’s easy to apply a narrative in hindsight, so a player with good performances on a high-profile stage is labelled a big-game talent, even though the difference between a win and a loss might be a couple of centimetres on a net cord.
But after Andreescu returned to the court after an injury layoff that kept her out from mid-may to early August, she quickly established that she had an eerie ability to play her best at the biggest moments.
At the Rogers Cup in Toronto, Andreescu dropped the first set in her first two matches, and dropped the second set in her next two matches. She would win all four matches, pulling out crucial points when the outcome seemed to hang in the balance.
After she beat Sofia Kenin in straight sets — finally — in the semis to set up a showdown with Serena Williams in the final, it was as though the tennis world had conspired to give her the biggest possible test. It was her hometown tournament, one that hadn’t been won by a Canadian in 50 years, and Williams was the WTA’S inexorable force. She has 22 Grand Slam singles titles and was player of the decade twice, effectively stringing two Hall of Fame careers back-to-back.
Andreescu had said she idolized her. Nothing like playing your hero at home, coming off an injury layoff, in your first full year on the WTA tour.
And while Williams would retire at 3-1 in the first set, citing back spams, to hand the Canadian the victory, it was telling that Andreescu hadn’t wobbled a bit on the big stage. She had already broken Williams’ serve when the match was halted. The pair shared some tears, and Williams would say that Andreescu “definitely doesn’t seem like a 19-yearold in her words, on court and her game, her attitude, her actions.”
It was, as it turned out, some interesting foreshadowing.
Two weeks after the win in Toronto, Andreescu arrived in New York for the U.S. Open and it was evident that her world had changed. She did a pre-tournament news conference in the big amphitheatre underneath Arthur Ashe Stadium, an unusual stage for someone entering only her fourth Grand Slam, but one befitting the sudden interest in her game.
Despite the increased attention, Andreescu was comfortable and focused in New York. She breezed through three wins in straight sets, including one over Wozniacki in the massive Ashe stadium, a stage that has been known to rattle newcomers.
In the fourth round she was back at Ashe for one of the U.S. Open’s signature late-night events, against an American, unranked Taylor Townsend, no less. She would wobble and teeter just a little, dropping the second set after whistling through the first, and the infamously interactive New York crowd became noticeably hostile toward her.
They cheered misses, they shouted during her service tosses, they did all the things that can make midnight in Queens a very uncomfortable place to play tennis. But Andreescu gathered herself after that second set and blew away Townsend in the third. Afterward, Andreescu said the crowd made things tough.
“I tried not to pay attention to that,” she said. “It’s hard when it’s, like, everyone.”
In the quarter-finals, Andreescu dropped the opening set for the first time in New York, but fought back to put away Belgium’s Elise Mertens.
“I’m going to be honest. I don’t think I played my best tennis,” she said.
Her opponent gave a note-perfect assessment: “She never gives up,” Mertens said.
Andreescu was into the semis, echoing the New York runs of teenagers past who would go on to become legends: Evert, Venus Williams and Pam Shriver.
In the semifinals, Andreescu ran into Switzerland’s Belinda Bencic, who played rock-steady tennis and had the Canadian on the defensive for most of the match. But Andreescu dominated a first-set tiebreaker, and after Bencic recovered for a 5-2 lead in the second set, Andreescu reeled off five straight games to clinch the victory.
“I think when I’m down, I play my best tennis,” she said. “Whenever my back is against the well, I think I’m just extra focused in those moments.”
So we had noticed.
Over two weeks at Flushing Meadows, Andreescu had done it all. She won on smaller outside courts in front of pro-canadian crowds. She won at Ashe during the day, and late at night, against crowds that favoured her and those that very much did not. She had easy wins and she had comeback wins. There was just one more test, a rematch with Serena Williams, who had won her first of six U.S. Open titles before Andreescu was even born.
It would be the match she was denied in Toronto. Andreescu played fearless tennis, winning the first set and taking a 5-1 lead in the second before, perhaps, the moment caught up to her. Williams levelled the set, and the crowd at Ashe was going bonkers. At one point, Andreescu stuck fingers in her ears to limit the noise. As quickly as it had come undone, though, the Canadian turned things around. She won the next two games and the title.
Later, Andreescu was asked about realizing her dream. She had written herself a fake U.S. Open winner’s cheque as a kid. Andreescu said it was crazy.
Then she stopped, at a loss, and tears started to come. She was told she could take a break.
“No, I’m good,” she said.
Bianca Andreescu, with renewed focus in the big moments, again.