A year can be a very long time in tennis.
At the 2018 US Open, Bianca Vanessa Andreescu – the world No 208 – lost in the first round of qualifying. A year later, she is in the semi-finals on her main draw debut as the 15th seed.
Calling 2019 a breakthrough year for the 19-year-old Canadian will be an understatement. She started the season with a fairy-tale run at the Auckland Open. The then 18-year-old qualifier beat top seed Caroline Wozniacki, Venus Williams, and Hsieh Su-wei before losing the final to Julia Goerges.
That was the first time she got the tennis world to really take notice of her. She built on the run in New Zealand and qualify for the Australian Open, where she lost in the second round. From having to qualify for the year’s first Grand Slam to being in the semi-finals of the last, Andreescu has put together one of the more astonishing seasons in recent times.
From world No 152 in Auckland she is now set to break into the WTA Top 10. This feat is even more remarkable given she missed five months of the year with a right shoulder injury. She retired after the first round at French Open and didn’t even play Wimbledon but has still won 31 of the 35 matches she has played this year and hasn’t lost a completed match since March.
The 15th seed was a dark horse even before the US Open began. With the biggest hardcourt titles in Indian Wells and Toronto, she definitely had the game and the gumption to make it big.
Women’s tennis hasn’t seen a teen Major Champion in over a decade – when Maria Sharapova won at Flushing Meadows in 2006. But with her solid battling wins, she has the chance to repeat the feat that world No 1 Naomi Osaka achieved last year. After all her just like the world No 1, the Canadian’s first big title came at Indian Wells. But Andreescu won the first premier mandatory tournament she played as a wildcard, becoming the youngest champion at the event since Serena Williams in 1999.
Chanelling Clijsters
Already, she is the first teen US Open semi-finalist in a decade as after rallying past 25th seed Elise Mertens 3-6, 6-2, 6-3 in the quarters on Thursday morning. The win put her in elite company, joining Chris Evert, Pam Shriver and Venus Williams as the only women to make the final four on debut in New York.
It was her second straight three-set win, showing the grit that goes with her powerful, all-court game. She had beaten qualifier Taylor Townsend 6-1, 4-6, 6-2 to reach the quarters.
Andreescu is also the first teen in the US Open’s last four since Caroline Wozniacki in 2009, who she beat 6-4, 6-4 in the third round. The former world No 1 gave one of the most striking description of the teen sensation: comparing the Canadian to retired Belgian star Kim Clijsters, a three-time US Open champion.
“She has made a mark. Obviously she’s playing well. The one I can most compare her game to would probably be Kim back in the day, Clijsters, because she moves well and she can stretch out and get to some balls and also play the aggressive and using the angles.”
Clijsters was indeed one of the idols who inspired Andreescu’s style of play. “I actually looked up to her a lot while I was just coming up, when I started playing tennis,” Andreescu said. “I think my game is pretty similar to hers. Not as good yet.”
Of the current lot, her idol is the reigning Wimbledon champion Simona Halep. Andreescu is a native Romanian herself, born in Canada to parents who had emigrated in 1995. But has lived and first learned tennis in the European country.
Stunning rise
Her coach Sylvain Bruneau first spotted her raw talent in 2017 when she went on a stunning run in the Fed Cup to take Canada back into World Group II by the end of the same year. They started working together in 2018, when she was still toiling on the ITF circuit, and even he didn’t expect her to make it to the top so soon.
“I was always struck by how she was not afraid of opponents, or not intimidated by situations that I felt, at first, when she was 15, 16, could be intimidating. And she wasn’t... I noticed very early on that she was a born competitor,” her coach Bruneau said.
This spirit has played a huge role in her ascent. Her game is solid: strong, swift and multidimensional, she can crack winners with ferocity but can mix up her shots with equal deftness to confound the opponent. But it is her killer instinct in points that really makes her stand out. She is unfazed by the opposition, many of whom are yet to figure out the relative newcomer.
At Indian Wells, she beat Garbine Muguruza, Elina Svitolina and Angelique Kerber to take home the title. At the Rogers Cup, she beat top five seeds Karolina Pliskova and Kiki Bertens before lifting her home title after Serena Williams tearfully retired in the final. Their exchange in the final earned the Canadian a legion of new fans as she consoled the veteran with encouraging words and hugged her.
Her path at the US Open – the upset Slam – seems relatively smoother with no Top-10 seed till the final. But even if she does beat 13th seed Belinda Bencic and plays her first Major final on Saturday against fifth seed Svitolina or eighth seed Williams, she won’t have too much to worry about. The teen has a 7-0 record against the WTA’s Top 10 this year and her win-loss record for 2019 is the highest winning percentage of anyone on tour.
“Is this real life?” she screamed to her box – that also had her dog Coco – after winning her quarter-final match. It is and neither the teenager nor the tennis world wants her to escape from this reality.
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