A radical rise that shatters all doubts
THERE was a beautiful irony in what the remarkable Emma Raducanu achieved last night and in the way she achieved it. When she lost at Wimbledon just a matter of weeks ago, forced to retire from her fourth-round match with breathing issues, some, including John McEnroe, suggested she might not be made of the right stuff.
Not made of the right stuff? Yesterday as the British 18-year-old stunned the world by winning the US Open, she played the kind of nerveless, steely, relentless tennis that Leylah Fernandez simply had no answer to. No one at Flushing Meadows has had any answer to it. Raducanu played brilliant tennis and, psychologically, she never gave her opponent one single glimpse of vulnerability or self-doubt.
What she did in New York defies belief. It was other worldly. It was film script stuff. It is one of the greatest underdog stories sport has ever produced. This is a player who nobody had heard of a few months ago and now she has won one of the greatest prizes in the sport without dropping a set. It is Leicester City’s Premier League winning season compressed into one impossibly surreal fortnight in the Big Apple.
Raducanu was ruthless in her dismissal of her Canadian opponent, just as she has been throughout the last fortnight and more. She broke her heart in the second game of the match when Fernandez saved a host of break points in a gargantuan game and then finally succumbed to Raducanu’s power and style. ‘Emma is the one pushing the envelope already,’ an admiring Martina Navratilova said in her commentary.
It was why, in a way, the manner in which she played yesterday felt even more important than the history she was making. Because this was high-quality tennis. This was the kind of tennis that suggests Raducanu’s astonishing triumph at Flushing Meadows will not be looked back upon in years to come as a fluke but as the gilded beginning of a wonderful career.
Women’s tennis has been searching for a leader ever since the brilliance of Serena Williams finally began to fade and in Raducanu it may just have found it. It had been 44 years since Virginia Wade became the last British woman to win a Grand Slam title but the way Raducanu blitzed her way through the field in New York last week suggested we may not have to wait long at all for the next one. When Wade won Wimbledon in 1977, she was renowned for putting her fans through the wringer on the way to her victories. She duly lost the first set of that ladies’ singles final to Betty Stove before rallying to win the next two sets. Raducanu has done it a different way. She has been utterly merciless in the manner of her victories.
When she lost her serve early in the second set and fell behind, some wondered whether she might crack and whether Fernandez, who had mounted stirring comebacks earlier in the tournament against the world’s best players, might be at it again. Raducanu simply broke Fernandez back in the next game. ‘You want to know how she reacts to losing her serve?’ Navratilova laughed, ‘that’s how she reacts.’
The beauty of what Andy Murray achieved when he won the US Open in 2012 and became the first British man to win a Grand Slam title for 76 years was that it was a slow burn. He had fought and fought for it. He was 25 and he had played in it eight times and, in the era of Roger Federer,
Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, people had begun to wonder openly whether he would win a big one.
It has not been like that for Radacanu. The beauty of what Raducanu achieved was that she has blown through tennis like a hurricane that gave precious little warning it was forming. She came from the margins, playing her first US Open at the age of 18, to stand at its summit.
In the struggle to come to terms with what tennis has been witnessing in New York, analysts have turned to history in the search for answers. But the answers were not there. Because what Raducanu achieved at the US Open was without precedent in the history of the sport. Nobody had come through the qualifying tournament at a Grand Slam and then won the Slam itself.
She has staged a revolution here in New York and by the time anyone realised she was seizing power it was too late. She even played out the last games of the match with a gashed knee after cutting it as she tried to retrieve a smash. Yes, she is made of the right stuff all right.