Emma Raducanu recently drew all the curtains, closed the windows and locked the doors. A long upstairs and downstairs was not necessary at all. Today, anyone who wants to let the blinds rattle down to keep out the curious public just needs to swipe their cell phone. After the Australian Open in January, Emma Raducanu deleted Instagram and Whatsapp from her mobile phone with a flick of the wrist – 2.5 million pairs of eyes were gone.
She learned that in the social media world, no matter how she behaves, she is always a target for some people, she said afterwards. She knows that her tennis game leaves a lot to be desired at the moment. Complete strangers don’t have to rub that in her face.
In the three and a half months since the beginning of the year, Emma Raducanu, the 2021 US Open champion, has played ten matches: won five, lost five. A trend that has now also found a continuation at the beginning of the clay court season in Stuttgart: At the start of the world-class indoor tournament, which is endowed with 780,637 US dollars, Raducanu, 20, lost to another former Grand Slam winner, Latvian Jelena Ostapenko 2, who was five years older :6, 1:6. The duel was as one-sided as the result sounds. Raducanu, capable of power tennis himself, was swept off the field by the force of Ostapenko’s aggressive forehand shots. In the seven opposing service games, you only get seven points. Getting only 55 percent of her own first serves over the net was a self-inflicted handicap. The lack of competition practice, which can be attributed to an injury to the batting hand, was far more striking.
The aching right wrist has been tormenting her for months. At the previous tournament, after a first-round loss in Miami, Raducanu indicated that she would consult specialists to speed up the healing. “The current solutions do not permanently fix the problem,” she said in Florida, without further describing the injury. After that, she took a three-week break from playing and decided not to play for the English national team at the Billie Jean King Cup so as not to further strain her wrist when switching from hard to clay courts, “on medical advice,” as she said.
England’s tabloids work out how many thousands of pounds she’s wearing on her earlobe
In the 19 months since the glorious fall weeks of New York, when the London high school graduate clinched the Flushing Meadow title as the first qualifier in Grand Slam history, she has endured a series of physical malaise. Sometimes the hip hurt, sometimes the foot, sometimes the arm. She also recently contracted tonsillitis.
The realization that she had to steel her rather narrow body for the exhausting exertions of the tennis tour led to the commitment of fitness expert Jaz Green, who had previously trained Andy Murray and Alexander Zverev. In any case, there was a constant coming and going in the Raducanu team: The German Sebastian Sachs, who used to work with the Swiss Olympic champion Belinda Bencic, has been on the sidelines since December. He has been Raducanu’s fifth coach since the US Open triumph.
This discontinuity characterizes Emma Raducanu’s brief professional career, and whenever her results have yielded little to talk about, the public, especially in England, has become all the more interested in the trivialities. Emma Raducanu, currently probably the most famous individual athlete on the island, like the Times wrote, has nine sponsorship deals; and when she promotes Tiffany, as she did at Wimbledon last year, the tabloids calculate to the public how many thousands of pounds sterling she has on her earlobes. She is also a brand ambassador at the Porsche Grand Prix in Stuttgart.
It was thanks to a wildcard that she got a place in the tournament’s main draw this time, as England’s best currently sits at 68th in the world. However, it’s all too easy to forget that she’s actually only playing her second full clay court season as a pro. 19 months ago it shot up into the starry sky like a satellite, and it often takes a while for a flying object to find its fixed orbit in these spheres. Jelena Ostapenko, who also won the French Open out of nowhere in 2017, dropped to 44th place three years later.
So Emma Raducanu has turned off a few background noises on her cell phone. And she doesn’t find “living a little behind the moon,” as she puts it, that unpleasant.