I wrote this piece shortly after Emma Raducanu won the US Open tennis tournament in September, 2019.
As I watched Emma Raducanu storm her way to victory in the US Open Women’s Singles Final on Monday, I experienced mixed emotions. In amongst the cacophony of celebration capping off a history-making run through the tournament, I was left with a foreboding feeling that I couldn’t push from my mind.
Primarily, like millions of people around the world, I felt a glowing sense of happiness. The unbridled joy of an 18-year-old fulfilling a childhood dream is beautifully infectious and utterly intoxicating.
Seeing her receive her trophy and proceed to speak eloquently about the future of the game of tennis filled me with admiration and awe at the maturity and poise of such a young star.
However, my strongest and most lasting emotions were a mix of dread, pity, uneasiness and guilt.
Call me a heartless pessimist, but all I could think of was how I saw it all going horribly wrong.
I felt like I had just watched someone transform in front of me. In an instant, a smiling, fiercely bright and confident teenager (who happens to be bloody good at tennis) become one of the most marketable people on the planet.
So much of the talk about her potential worth to advertisers makes me feel like we’re discussing the pedigree of a prized racehorse or champion bull, not a precociously talented human being. Yes, she’s Canadian-born with a Romanian father and Chinese mother. Yes, she can speak fluent mandarin. Yes, she plays a sport with immense reach and limitless promotional opportunities. Yes, she is the essence of a global citizen, a healing potion for an increasingly disjointed and divided world.
Forget the US $2.5 million prize money for winning the final. Already, there are predictions she may become the highest-paid female sports star ever.
So why not celebrate a young superstar in the making? Because the story is all too familiar. I feel I have seen this scene innumerable times before, played out across sports the world over. In tennis, for every one Ash Barty there are a dozen Bernard Tomics.
Clearly, we know so little about ruthless, relentless media pressure and and its effect on gentle young minds. It feels cruel or almost criminal to reward someone’s success with a forensic inspection of their life.
This is Ground Control to Major Tom You've really made the grade And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear…
This year alone, Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka are potent examples of how the parasitic tentacles of stardom infect even the calmest, safest reaches of athletes’ minds to a point where they feel the need to withdraw from competition.
If she can survive the present media attention, the focus will inevitably switch to an examination of her past.
In June this year, England fast bowler Ollie Robinson was suspended after racist and sexist tweets he posted in 2012 and 2013 resurfaced online during his debut Test match. Just this month, Middlesbrough FC defender Marc Bola was charged by the FA for an inappropriate social media post made when he was 14.
If digital evidence exists of Emma Raducanu ever having made a mistake, like 7.9 billion of us on earth do every day, we will hear about it.
And she simply won’t win. If nothing can be found, it won’t be because she has had a balanced education and fantastic upbringing, but because she’s too sheltered, or over-protected, or because whatever it is just hasn’t been found yet.
So, the rest of her playing career is laid out in front of her. With the unrelenting, unimaginable weight of a millions of pairs of eyes on her, and millions of dollars waiting a few precious match points away, she’ll never be able to toss a water bottle in frustration, or be cross at a petrified 14-year-old ball kid for not shading her properly with their umbrella at a change of ends, or forget to put on a sponsor’s watch and jacket for her post-match interview after losing in a first-round in straight sets.
Honestly, who’d want to be a professional athlete in 2021. Covid bubbles, crowds, no crowds, cancelled this, rescheduled that, and the media want your answers to questions that have so far stumped career-epidemiologists and Prime Ministers alike.
So it’s hopeless, doom-and-gloom, she should retire tomorrow?
Well, no. To flip a well-rinsed phrase, with great responsibility comes great power. Raducanu can look to the work of her fellow British sports stars Marcus Rashford and Lewis Hamilton and what they have achieved for child poverty and race relations respectively. Above all, she’s a young person who has overcome pressure and anxiety and gone on to success, at a time when the world is full of young people under pressure and anxiety of their own. That is a story worth telling, and one we hope should long continue.
***
I wrote this piece in September 2019. Since then, after a mix of injuries and poor results, she has fallen from no. 10 in the world to her current position of no. 75. She has endorsement deals with Nike, Wilson, HSBC, Porsche, Vodafone, British Airways, Evian, Tiffany & Co., and Dior. She is yet to pass the second round of a grand slam tournament since her breakthrough win at the US Open.
She is still just 20 years old.
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