The amazing Emma Raducanu at 18 years and 10 months signs a feat that marks the history of tennis, not only for women: beating 6-4 6-3 in the final of the US Open, the 19-year-old Leylah Fernandez is the first, including males, to take a Grand Slam starting from the qualifiers. But that’s not all.
In ten matches, including the three of the qualifiers, Bromley’s girlfriend has never lost a set, leaving her opponents at most five games per set: crazy.
From today she is number 23 in the world, but in New York she had come from number 150, and only in July she was just number 338. She has not yet won a match in a real WTA tournament – the first one she played in Nottingham at June – but in the Grand Slams she is almost unbeaten. In fact, she made her debut this year at Wimbledon, entering the draw thanks to a wild card, an invitation from the players, and retiring due to a breathing problem after arriving in the round of 16. The icing on the cake: Emma ended the final with ace, after having a matchpoint canceled and saving two break points in the last game.
She is, again, the first Englishwoman to win a Grand Slam since Virginia Wade, who yesterday admired her moved from the stands at Arthur Ashe Stadium. Wade imposed herself at Wimbledon in 1977 and in 1968 she had won the first open edition of the US Championships, then always played in New York, but on the grass of the West Side Tennis Club.
In short, an unprecedented story that relaunches women’s tennis also in the perspective of a rivalry with the Canadian Leylah Fernandez, who during the tournament annoyed two former number 1s, Naomi Osaka and Angelique Kerber, the number 5 Svitolina and the number 2 Sabalenka in the semifinals.
It was since 1999 that two teenagers had not shared the final of the US Open; then it was Serena Williams who beat Martina Hingis, and inevitably the comparisons started. Certainly Raducanu has great numbers, even if the most credible comparison is the one with the Chinese Na Li, with whom she shares a powerful, clean, linear tennis, and at least half of the origins, since mother Renee is Chinese.
A very young final, 37 years in two, but also ethnically very composite, given that the father of Raducanu, born in Canada and moved to England at the age of two, is Romanian, while the Canadian Fernandez, who now lives in the States, was born in Canada from an Ecuadorian father and a Canadian mother of Filipino descent. The world is theirs, and not just metaphorically.
“I hope that we will meet many more times, and that they will be final,” Raducanu said during the award ceremony, but the sentence of the day bears the signature of her opponent: “I know that today is a special day for New York and New Yorkers, thanks to have supported me, I hope to have the strength and resilience that you have shown over the past twenty years. “
Whatever happens, twin stars.