sport news OLIVER HOLT: How has Emma Raducanu been allowed to sink this low? trends now
If Emma Raducanu never wins another tennis match in her life, she will have achieved more than the vast majority of elite players will ever achieve. She won a Grand Slam. She is a US Open winner. She is a history-maker. Last year, she was at the centre of one of the greatest sports stories that this country has ever produced and ever will produce.
In the aftermath of her first-round exit at Flushing Meadows last week and in the light of a debut year on the WTA circuit that has been characterised by misfortune and upheaval, practically every sports journalist I have read and every commentator I have listened to has been generous and fair in their appraisals of her progress.
Raducanu is 19 and there are only four other teenagers in the women’s top 100, so even when her ranking plummets to about 80 next week, she will still be in rare company. She came out of nowhere to win the US Open last summer and only the fanciful or the ignorant expected her to be challenging for more Grand Slam titles this year. That was never going to happen.
Emma Raducanu crashed out of the US Open in the first round on Wednesday afternoon
But what do we want now for Raducanu? No one is expecting her to be the next Serena Williams because Serena, who won 23 Grand Slam singles titles and has a claim to be the greatest tennis player of all time, redefined the women’s game and went on redefining it until the last shot of her career on Friday night.
After a week of utterly compelling performances, Serena finally succumbed to Ajla Tomljanovic in three sets in their third-round tie but not before she had taught us more about what is possible for a player in their 41st year if they have the hunger and the desire and the talent to do it.
There are elements of Serena’s early career that will give encouragement to Raducanu, too. Serena won the US Open in 1999, when she was 17, but then it was nearly three years until she won her next Grand Slam singles title, at Roland Garros in the spring of 2002. Raducanu has time on her side.
Her journey in this year's American Grand Slam was of stark contrast to her title win last year
So if we are to be berated for harbouring unrealistic expectations for Raducanu, what is a realistic expectation now? Do we expect her, over the next couple of years, to return to the top of women’s tennis, knowing how much sacrifice that will entail? Or is that foolish? Should we accept that last year’s US Open was a glorious one-off?
The coverage of her progress has been overwhelmingly sympathetic but it was clear from the way that Raducanu bristled at something as innocuous as being referred to as the ‘defending champion’ ahead of her first-round loss to Alize
