Velvet touch and will of iron ease Briton past test
As Emma Raducanu strode through the double doors for her “central reveal”, as Wimbledon have loftily rechristened the players’ Centre Court entrances this year, she gave herself a few moments to grasp the grandeur of the setting.
Remarkably, for a young woman whose face adorns almost every billboard in south-west London, she had never graced tennis’s grandest citadel before.
That novelty, coupled with her side strain and halting adjustments to the grind of life on tour, had encouraged ideas that she might crumble.
Consider those theories emphatically debunked.
The 101 minutes Raducanu needed to vanquish Alison Van Uytvanck, the statuesque Belgian with the booming serve and wicked slice, offered the most persuasive testament to her talents since she skittled all-comers for fun in New York.
This was a test fraught with danger, against an opponent who already had two grasscourt titles this year, but one she negotiated with a velvet touch and a will of iron.
The relief she showed after dispatching the decisive volley told you everything about the manner of this victory and its magnitude. Normally, a player seeded 10th at her home major would mark first-round, straight-sets progress with a businesslike handshake. But for Raducanu, this meant more.
She bounced and whirled across the court, shaking her fists at her ever-expanding support team in the stands. Even her difficult-to-please mother Renee, from whom she did not even receive a congratulatory text after winning a US Open quarterfinal, looked thrilled.
Raducanu’s approach, she later explained, had been to play every point as if it were her last on this stage. That might sound a touch fatalistic for a 19-year-old. But given the emotional extremes of the previous nine months, it made sense. The course she has chosen is a precarious one, so mired in uncertainty that grandmother Niculina, watching from her home in Bucharest, wonders if she might be tempted to study in Cambridge instead.
Despite achieving so much, so soon, she only ever seems to be one defeat away from being dismissed as a one-and-done slam champion. But here she cast off the dead weight of public expectation.
Tim Henman, one of her key mentors, cautions that Raducanu lacks the physical strength to win at the highest level consistently. Her psychological mettle, though, is not in question. John Mcenroe was within his rights to claim that “things got a little bit too much for her” when she retired from the fourth round last summer in tears. But at these moments of maximum strain, she no longer looks the type to be overwhelmed.
Regardless of the fact she was not at full fitness, she displayed plenty of agility when she needed it most, crouching down low to take the sting out of Van Uytvanck’s hard, flat returns.
Raducanu has often identified Simona Halep as her childhood idol. This time, it was the spirit of Rafael Nadal that she channelled conspicuously, going so far as to wear the Spaniard’s “raging bull” logo on her kit. The ploy, she said, was to make sure her energy never flagged. By any measure, it worked:
Off court, she is a model of English restraint, but on it, she is a fearsome adversary in this mood
this was one occasion where her intensity only increased in the crucial phases of the second set.
It is among the compelling curiosities of Raducanu’s short career that the higher the stakes, the more hardwired she is to deliver. Seldom has a player so embodied the old Billie Jean King maxim that pressure is a privilege. On the farthest outposts of the regular circuit, she has looked brittle. But against the most august backdrops in the game, she somehow elevates her performance to match.
We saw as much in New York, where she handled a final on Arthur Ashe Stadium with such poise that she was singing along to Sweet Caroline by the end. The adrenalin rush she draws from a capacity crowd was self-evident here, too. The sweeter the winner, the more she exhorted the audience to dial up the noise. Off court, she can be a model of English restraint, but on it, she is a fearsome adversary in this mood. It was with some pride that she reflected that in her five slams, she has not fallen at the first hurdle yet. Even under the fiercest scrutiny, she simply refuses to wither.