Raducanu rapidly goes from hunter to being hunted
➤ US Open winner is facing a crash course in learning how vicious tour life can be with a target on your back
For Flavia Pennetta to claim that Emma Raducanu’s US Open glory “could never have happened” in her day looks at first like a gratuitous barb, a sour sideswipe by a woman who needed 15 years on tour before winning the title in New York against a teenager who managed it in 15 weeks.
And yet the wider point she raises about the “very strong discontinuity” in the women’s game is a cogent one. When the Italian first toiled on the circuit in the early 2000s, she surveyed a landscape dominated by the Williams sisters, Lindsay Davenport, Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin, multiple major champions all.
By comparison, the tour to which Raducanu is striving to adjust resembles a free-for-all. No sooner did her recordshredding US Open triumph set the seal on perhaps the wildest slam in living memory than the cocktail-mixer was shaken again, with none of the four female semi-finalists in Indian Wells having reached even the last 16 at Flushing Meadows. The shade thrown by Pennetta also illustrates how starkly the equation for Raducanu has changed.
In just six weeks, she has morphed from the hunter, toppling the reigning Olympic champion, Belinda Bencic, with barely a backwards glance, to the hunted, with a plethora of opponents desperate to chip away at her lustre.
It has been a veritable crash course in what it feels like to be shot at.
Firstly, her grand return in the Californian desert ran aground against Aliaksandra Sasnovich, a 27-year-old Belarusian who had never been beyond the fourth round at a slam but who swept her aside for the loss of just six games.
Was this a signal that she should invest energy less in James Bond premieres than in trying to find a full-time coach to replace Andrew Richardson? Not if you ask Team Raducanu, who within days announced a deal for her to become the latest face of Dior.
“The 18-year-old British virtuoso has already shaken up the codes with her unique game style, multicultural personality, authenticity and extraordinary career,” said the French fashion house, breathlessly.
It is a career, lest anyone forget, that has spanned the grand total of five WTA tournaments.
The expansion of her endorsement portfolio is unlikely to relent. Max Eisenbud, her representative at super-agency IMG, gave a telling remark to
The New York Times: “The iron’s hot – we’re striking.”
But this week’s broadside by Pennetta, denigrating the young Briton’s feat in lifting a first major trophy without dropping a set as “not good for tennis”, is a reminder of how fragile the Raducanu phenomenon remains.
On the one hand, she is a figure of precocious self-awareness, understanding how many rivals are hell-bent on disrupting her best-laid plans and how she needs to “cut myself some slack”. But on the other, Raducanu is starting to discover that tennis’ veneer of gentility conceals a realm of vicious backbiting. While she is wise enough not to have clashed with any of her peers just yet – much as Leylah Fernandez protested about her medical time-out at break point down in the New York final – she learns from Pennetta’s comments that even retired players can be witheringly unkind.
Maria Sharapova, Eisenbud’s former client, grasped this toxicity only too well.
Her response to becoming a Wimbledon champion at 17 was to fortify her defences, reinventing herself as a hyper-corporate ice maiden, even if this meant alienating the entire locker room. “Arrogant, conceited and cold” was how Dominika Cibulkova once described her.
But Sharapova arrived at superstardom via a very different route to Raducanu. Wrenched from Russia to Florida at the age of seven so that she could be fast-tracked by Nick Bollettieri, she learnt uncommonly early the myopia that elite tennis would require.
Raducanu, by contrast, was until six months ago an unassuming schoolgirl cramming for her A-levels. She has been transplanted at lightning speed from her Bromley friendship groups into the ruthless dynamics of life on tour. While she has proved exceptionally mature at absorbing pressure on court, she is still relatively guileless about a backstage environment that Sharapova called her “least favourite place in the world”. For all that she has hordes of well-wishers from the red carpet to Romania, where she competes in next week’s Transylvania Open, she needs to be wary of the “tall poppy syndrome” that plagues her sport.
The more she flourishes, the more detractors like Pennetta will be determined to cut her down.