The Sunday Times November 28, 2021 13
Sportswomen of the Year
Judy Murray, who runs the Miss-Hits
academy, which aims to get more girls
playing tennis, said Raducanu’s suc-
cess “couldn’t be better for getting
more girls involved in playing”.
It is staggering to remember that
Raducanu is only 19. The weight of the
responsibility to bring more young
girls into the game and be a shining
example could crush her, but she
appears to wear it lightly. After her US
Open triumph, she said she wanted to
“inspire girls to dream big”. “I just
want to get across that you can be a
normal kid, have all the normal things
and still achieve results,” she said.
“Three months ago she was doing
her A-levels — I think that is part of her
appeal,” Kate Dale, campaign lead on
This Girl Can and Sportswomen of the
Year judge, told the BBC in September.
“She’s very relatable.”
Inspiring the next generation is
important but never more so than this
year, when the true damage of the Cov-
id-19 lockdowns on exercise levels is
starting to become clear.
“You have to see yourself doing it,”
Dale said. “It doesn’t have to be up at
that level but just somebody living her
best life really inspires us all to do that.”T
he morning after Emma
Raducanu won the US Open,
the ink barely dry on the front
pages reporting her historic
success, nominations for this
year’s Sunday Times Sports-
women of the Year awards
opened to the public. It was
laughably perfect — completely acci-
dental — timing and, unsurprisingly,
many people said she was a shoo-in.
In fact, the Sportswoman of the Year
has rarely been as competitive as this
year. Raducanu was the only non-
Olympian or Paralympian on a stellar
shortlist, filled with names from a
record-breaking summer in Tokyo,
including Laura Kenny and Dame
Sarah Storey, who had become Brit-
ain’s most decorated female Olympian
and Paralympian respectively. But
Raducanu triumphed, becoming the
youngest athlete to win the prestigious
accolade in its 34-year history, and the
first tennis player. Kenny took second
place and Storey third.
In her acceptance speech, Radu-
canu said it had been “a fantastic year
for women’s sport” and paid tribute to
the other nominees. “There are so
many great candidates, so it’s a pleas-
ure to be nominated among those and
some incredible past winners.”
The Sportswoman of the Year
award, which is decided by a panel fea-
turing representatives from UK Sport,
Sport England, Women in Sport, and
some of the most successful British
sportswomen, including Baroness
Tanni Grey-Thompson and Dame Jes-
sica Ennis-Hill, is judged primarily on
sporting achievement, a measurement
in which Raducanu excelled. But it
would be remiss to ignore the less-
measurable “Raducanu effect” that
has gripped the nation since she firstentered the public consciousness at
Wimbledon. It’s an indefinable quality,
a sporting magic that governing bodies
dare to pray for once in a generation,
when an athlete jumpstarts the imagi-
nation of children and young people.
Anecdotally, the sport of tennis has
had a boom in popularity since that
night in New York, with Iain Bates,
head of women’s tennis at the Lawn
Tennis Association, calling it a
“watershed moment” and saying
that he believed Raducanu’s suc-
cess would attract more people to
play at grassroots level.
“She transcends the immediate
tennis audience and that’s so
important,” he said. “She can incen-
tivise more people to give tennis a go.”Shock US Open
victory has
given the
women’s game
a much-needed
shot in the arm
SPORTSWOMEN YEAR 2021
OF
THE
Night
tennis
got a
new idol
Raducanu went
from 338th in the
world to winner of
a grand-slam title5-PAGE
SPECIAL
Emily Campbell (weightlifting);
Kate French (modern pentathlon);
Laura Kenny (cycling); Lauren
Price (boxing); Emma Raducanu
(tennis); Sarah Storey (cycling)SPORTSWOMAN OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTREBECCA
MYERS