the times | Wednesday June 8 2022 9times2
At the London Aquarium, a
gentoo penguin was named
Raducanu in her honour.
Today, she has signed
multimillion-pound
endorsement deals with a raft of
brands including Tiffany & Co,
Porsche, Evian, Dior, British
Airways and Vodafone. When
she competed in the US Open
there was £44 in her corporate
bank account.
That win on its own netted
her £1.8 million, and she now
has an estimated annual income
from sponsorship alone of
almost £10 million. Eddie Jones, the
England rugby union head coach,
said late last year that Raducanu had
been burdened by commercial
“distractions”, although he later
wrote to her to clarify his comments.
Raducanu said in response
that the criticism was
undeserved. She could train for
12 hours a day, she said, but if she
posts once on social media “all of a
sudden it’s ‘I don’t focus on tennis’ or
whatever. I think that is unfair.”
She was named BBC SportsEmma Raducanu
during London Fashion
Week. Left: forced to
retire at Nottingham
yesterday and, below,
winning the US OpenPersonality of the Year in 2021, the
first female tennis player to win since
Virginia Wade in 1977, and told The
Daily Telegraph that far from being
distracted from her tennis, she
practises for five hours a day, four days
a week. She is not, she said recently,
“the finished product at all. But yeah,
I’m heading in a good direction.
“I’m still 19, I’ve already won a
grand slam and I can sort of take
my time,” she said to the Daily Mail.
“I trust what I do.”
She parted company with her
coach two weeks after the US Open,
has since parted ways with two more
and is now without a coach. Her
performance has been patchy. Since
then, she has yet to win more than two
matches at a tournament.
She lost in straight sets the first
match she played after the US Open,
the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells,
California, in October, but made the
quarter-finals of a WTA tournament
in Romania later that month.
The past year has paradoxically
been her first on the professional
circuit, even though she is already a
grand slam winner, prompting
Annabel Croft, a former British No 1,
to point out that she had done
everything back to front “and now
has this massive target on her back”.
Raducanu, who still lives at home
with her parents, told a magazine
recently that she barely spends
two or three days a month at
home because she’s travelling the
world on her first year as a
professional player.
“I’d say I’m really normal, my
mum shouts at me for everything, like,
‘Wash your face!’ because otherwise I
pretty much don’t. I’m just a normal
kid, a normal 19-year-old.”
Poised to start the season in
January at three events in Australia,
she withdrew from the first, in
Melbourne, lost in the first round in
Sydney and crashed out in the second
round at the Australian Open.
In April she made the quarter-finals
in her debut on clay in Stuttgart and
reached the last 16 at the Madrid
Open, but retired from the Italian
Open last month with a back injury.
Conceding that the physical demands
of her first tour are gruelling, she has
said, “It’s definitely a lot of work to
stay at the top.”
In Nottingham yesterday she retired
injured after seven games having
suffered what she called a “freak
injury”. “I think I pulled something,”
she said. “I’m not really sure
exactly what happened. I need
to get a scan.”
With Wimbledon due
to start in less than three
weeks, Raducanu’s
participation is suddenly
in doubt. She said recently
that she hopes to play
tennis for as long as
possible, and at only 19
she has everything still to
play for. Whether she’ll be able to,
only time will tell.T
his time last year
an unknown tennis
player from southwest
London played a
match in Nottingham.
The 18-year-old had
just finished her
A-levels and it was
her first match on the WTA tour.
She lost. Three months later, Emma
Raducanu won the US Open.
Yesterday the world No 11 was back
in Nottingham, playing her first
competitive match on British soil since
her triumph at Flushing Meadows.
She is now Emma Raducanu MBE,
multimillionaire, global superstar and
one of the British icons picked to
record a jubilee message for the
Queen. “It’s been quite a year” doesn’t
really cover it.
Raducanu was born in Toronto but
her parents, Ian and Renee, moved to
London when she was two. An only
child, she started playing tennis when
she was five, got her first coach aged
six and, to the exasperation of some
neighbours, spent hours and hours
practising with her father in the street
outside the family home next to a sign
saying “no ball games”.
“After the US Open they were very
happy I’d been doing that,” she told
The Telegraph Magazine last month.
Today her Twitter biog reads
“London, Toronto, Shenyang,
Bucharest”, reflecting the
heritage of her father, who grew
up in Bucharest, and her mother,
from Shenyang, as a result of
which she speaks Romanian and
Mandarin.
In the wake of her US Open
win she recorded a message in
fluent Mandarin for her Chinese
fans, but had less success when
she tried Italian. Asked if she’d
picked up any of the language
while in Rome for the Italian
Open, she charmed millions by
innocently replying yes, “che
cazzo” — slang for “what the f***”.
Her inauspicious debut in
Nottingham last summer was enough
to earn her a wild-card entry to her
first grand slam, Wimbledon. She
made it through to the last 16 before
retiring with breathing difficulties
during a game, prompting John
McEnroe to speculate that the
experience “got a little bit too much”
for her. Hopefully, he added, she
would learn from the experience.
Her learning curve off the court
has been steep. Two days afterwinning the US Open she was on the
red carpet at the Met Gala wearing
Tiffany diamonds and Chanel. Her
followers on social media had started
climbing towards the 2.3 million on
Instagram where they stand today,
and she has said that she makes a
conscious decision never to read the
comments beneath her posts.
Shortly after she scored an A star
in maths and an A in economics
A-levels, she won an invitation to the
James Bond premiere No Time to Die,
to which she wore floor-length Dior.A g R m e b P A s t b h hfr
i i th USO h th l tDAVID M BENETT/GETTY IMAGESFrocks, hot shots and growing
pains: 12 months in Emma’s world
A ‘freak injury’
means Raducanu’s
Wimbledon is in
doubt. It has been
a whirlwind year,
says Hilary Rose