Photograph by Andy Hall/ The Observer
The woman whom Emma Raducanu beat in the 2021 US Open final is known for her cheery outlook and upbeat social media posts.
The Canadian Leylah Fernandez was 19 when she fell to the even younger Raducanu (then 18). Since then Fernandez has won three singles titles, reached a French Open quarter-final and acquired a current world ranking of 38. Departing this year’s Wimbledon in the second round she posted: “Even though the song changes, you gotta keep dancing.”
In New York four years ago a 6-4, 6-3 scoreline is all that separated Fernandez and Raducanu. But their lives took wildly divergent paths. Fernandez built a solid but unspectacular career that has earned her $6.4million (£4.6million) in prize-money. Raducanu has made less than that ($5.1million) with a racket in her hand but vastly more from her celebrity profile. Unlike Fernandez, though, she is still a bit trapped in 2021.
“I have never seen anything like this and I suspect if I work in this business for another 20 years I won’t see anything like it,” the BBC’s tennis correspondent Russell Fuller said back then. A stampede started to make Raducanu the face of everything and her social media numbers went cosmic.
She was the first qualifier in the open era to win a Grand Slam title; the first British women’s winner of one since Virginia Wade in 1977; the youngest Grand Slam winner since Maria Sharapova in 2004. There was nothing a scriptwriter could have added to embellish the thrill of her victory. She even spoke Mandarin: the key, pundits said, to boundless wealth.
Here at Wimbledon yesterday the cognoscenti were still digesting Raducanu’s defeat by Aryna Sabalenka the previous night, when Centre Court and five million BBC viewers examined her with renewed intensity.
In other sports Raducanu’s US Open would have been tagged by now as a one-hit wonder. The crowd would have melted away. The fairy tale of New York would have been filed as a textbook case of a teenager starting at the top and working their way down.
But there is something in the Raducanu boxset that keeps the public engaged, preserves faith in a rebirth, makes them want to see 2021 as the start, not the end, of a miracle. The digital metrics which measure all human life say that interest in her stayed high, even when her commercial profile eclipsed her game, the injury bulletins came thick and fast and coaches span through a revolving door.
Before her loss to Sabalenka under the Friday night lights there was a fevered focus on her demeanour. The glory days, or day, would return, the theory goes, if she could finally lift the burden of expectation and scrutiny; retrain her mind to see that sport, even at this level, has to be enjoyable for it to make any sense.
‘I need to get to a place where I’m secure enough that it doesn’t matter what other people are saying’
Emma Raducanu
The two-and-a-half-hour hike and “deep conversation” in the California hills in March with her mentor Mark Petchey helped relieve the siege. Her mistrustful, faintly hounded bearing was suggestive of a young athlete seeing threats and judgements everywhere.
The California ramble is a pleasing image. “Every time I step on the court, every time I kind of make a choice, it is up for judgement,” Raducanu said a month later. “And I just need to get to a place where I’m comfortable enough and secure enough in what I’m doing that it doesn’t matter what other people are saying.
“Over the last few years, that is, truthfully, something that I have been kind of toiling with, because I would care about what people think. I think just in general, in my life, like any time someone’s upset with me or something, it affects me.”
Those inner voices must be respected. But there is an external one that Petchey has tried to steer her towards: the one that says Raducanu, who is ranked two places below Fernandez, is too far behind the world’s top 10 for her to accept. She has won only one of her 14 matches against top-eight opposition.
That pattern – and her second-set implosion against Sabalenka, who upped her game – points to Raducanu settling into the second or third wave of Grand Slam title contenders, outside the firmament. Even her second-round win against the 2023 champion Markéta Vondroušová failed to shift the suspicion that she finds the biggest names too formidable. Petchey has a timeframe for her to correct that weakness.
He said before this Wimbledon fortnight: “My mantra to her has been – ‘You are starting your career now. Everyone is judging you on what happened in 2021 but the reality is, I want to see you building a career here where people judge you in two years.’”
In one Friday night defeat Raducanu had issues with her racket tension, took an awkward fall and questioned the new Hawk-Eye line technology. But she also took responsibility for not “executing” better and promised to go straight back to work on her flaws. “It gives me confidence that I’m not as far away as I perhaps thought before the tournament,” she said of her defeat.
Fernandez, meanwhile, speaks English, French and Spanish, loves dancing and “solving puzzles” and is studying business at university. She lives with neither the blessing nor the curse of being an overnight sensation. Radacanu, though, will always have the Grand Slam trophy, even if it ends up standing alone on her shelf.