Elina Svetolina, favourite to win in Australia
Australian Open favourite Elina Svitolina tells Simon Briggs how she fell for fast bowler Reece Topley – and T20
Last weekend, Australian Open favourite Elina Svitolina won her lead-up tournament in Brisbane. The entourage in her player’s box included a new face: a burly 6ft 3in chap with a bushy moustache.
Tennis is a tight-knit community, so everybody in the locker room was trying to work out who this Obelix like character was. When asked, he just smiled wryly and said “security”. Today The Sunday Telegraph can identify the mystery figure as former Essex fast bowler Don Topley, 53, who had taken the day off from leading an Ashes tour group around Australia.
It was an unexpected combination, admittedly. As rival summer sports, tennis and cricket rarely mix. And neither do Odessa and Ipswich. But Svitolina – who comes from Ukraine’s second city – is breaking new ground.
In 2018, she is on track to celebrate the two-year anniversary of her romance with Reece Topley, Don’s son and another professional fast bowler.
“It was very special,” said Svitolina of Don’s unscheduled appearance. “I didn’t know that he was coming. They tell me he would be there for the final, and I was like, ‘Oh, no pressure then!’ But it was so nice of him to come and to support me on that day. I’m thankful for his time.”
Topley Jnr had originally planned to be in Australia, too, but he was forced to prioritise conditioning over tennis because of the latest in a series of spinal stress fractures – incapacitating injuries that have paused his tally of England caps on 16. Still, the progress of the relationship can be judged by the fact that, in September, Svitolina bought a flat in London.
“We don’t live together, because Reece is training in Hampshire,” said Svitolina. “But I see him quite often. In Ukraine, we don’t have this sport, but now I know what it is because of him. In the summer, I really enjoy when I was watching the Twenty20 matches. For me it’s nice to see different athletes and how they compare and what they do.”
This process of comparison extended to the back-garden net at the Topley family house in Suffolk, where the hosts tried – with limited success – to educate Svitolina in the art of the forward defensive. “She’s got a great eye, of course,” Don Topley explained. “But she will keep trying to put top-spin on her shots.”
How did a world-class rackets winger like Svitolina come to be wielding a 3lb hunk of willow in the first place? Her connection with England began through Iain Hughes, the coach who joined her in 2014. Aged 19 at the time, Svitolina was already a top-40 player with a base in Monaco, and her career was developing in textbook fashion. Each year since her tour debut in 2010, her year-end ranking has climbed, so that she now stands at No 4 on the ladder. Hughes’s influence meant that Svitolina found herself in England for a few extra weeks per year. During one such visit, in the summer of 2016, she was lifting weights with her fitness trainer in the Chiswick Riverside gym when Cupid’s arrow struck home. “I spotted him straight away,” she has explained. “It wasn’t difficult – he is two metres tall [6ft 7in] and very strong. I was very focused on my training and then I saw him in the restaurant afterwards.” However the conversation unfolded, Topley must have struggled to describe cricket’s intricacies. Svitolina came away from their first meeting under the impression that he was a professional curler. Not a hairdresser, that is, but one of those Winter Olympians who scrub frantically at a sheet of ice with a broom. (It sounds amusing, but there are plenty who would argue that five-day Tests are equally weird.)
Once that misunderstanding had been ironed out, Svitolina attended half a dozen of Topley’s matches for Hampshire last summer, once turning up discreetly at Hove in a baseball cap. Not that anyone was likely to identify her, for Svitolina remains something of a sleeper: the top-five player who can visit the London premiere of the Billie Jean King movie Battle of the Sexes in mufti – as she did in November – and still not be clocked as one of King’s modern successors.
“Reece gets recognised in the street more than me,” she said. “Cricket is more popular here! But tennis is getting bigger and bigger in Ukraine each year, and for me it’s good news. I try to work on these things, to promote tennis in Ukraine so that people can focus on sport as well as on politics all the time.”
Her visits home are mainly to see her parents, former wrestler Mykhaylo and former rower Olena. Her brother Yulian, who is nine years older, works as a tennis coach in Los Angeles so she catches up with him on her way to Indian Wells every spring. Otherwise, Svitolina is increasingly Londoncentric, spending long hours at the glamorous members-only Harbour Club – once known as Princess Diana’s favourite gym – near Chelsea Bridge.
“I really like the place,” she said. “There is a swimming pool, the recovery is perfect, there is 20-something courts indoors. They don’t have other professional tennis players there so I practise with my hitting partner Andrew Bettles [a sometime Futures player from Hertfordshire]. But there is celebrities. I can’t tell you who, but they are very famous!”
Svitolina would enjoy the fringe benefits of the celebrity life, judging by a modelling shoot she did for Ukrainian men’s magazine XXL during the off-season. (“It was nice for me to play a different part for a day,” she said.) But she knows that she has to earn that renown first, and despite her incremental improvement, she has yet to feature on the biggest stages. Her deepest runs at a grand slam have come at the French Open, where she has twice made the quarter-final.
Could that all change here? After her success in Brisbane, the bookmakers are listing Svitolina – who is still only 23 – as the 8-1 joint favourite (alongside world No 1 Simona Halep) in an admittedly open field. Now all she has to do is transfer her regular tour form to Melbourne Park, and something dramatic might happen.
“You have lots of different kind of pressure when you’re playing grand slams,” she said. “Sometimes you’re not focused on your game plan, you’re not ready to compete, you’re just all over the place. You have to just come back to the basics, just start building again.”
Should that game plan come together, a replica of the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup could soon be sitting on a mantelpiece in south-west London. Plus, we can start claiming Svitolina as a fringe participant in the underpopulated British tennis scene.
There would be downsides too, however. The next time she goes to watch her boyfriend play cricket, she really will need security.
‘I spotted him straight away. It wasn’t difficult – he is two metres tall and very strong’