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(43,160 posts) Tue Sep 7, 2021, 08:35 PM Sep 2021

Meet Emma Raducanu, the British Teen Taking Tennis By Storm

“If You Have Inner Strength, You Can Achieve Whatever You Want”: Vogue Meets Emma Raducanu, The British Teen Taking Tennis By Storm

Emma Raducanu has made history as the youngest British player to reach the quarter finals of the US Open. Olivia Marks meets the 18 year-old tennis star who’s captured the nation’s hearts and imagination.

https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/emma-raducanu-interview

Swoosh! Emma Raducanu’s tennis racket slices through the air to the approving coos of spectators, as dust rises from where her feet have gracefully landed on the ground. From underneath her cap, she stares straight ahead, focused, serious. Then the camera clicks and the 18-year-old from Kent breaks into a wide, toothy grin. Raducanu—the young tennis star who, this summer, appeared as if from nowhere to become the nation’s most exciting player in a decade—is in a north London studio being photographed for British Vogue, offering the assorted collection of delighted onlookers (stylist, make-up artist, assistants) a tiny snapshot of the talent that helped make her the first debuting British woman in 42 years to get to the fourth round of Wimbledon.

Whirlwind doesn’t adequately describe the life-changing days that the teenager experienced on the fabled grass courts, which saw a wild card—then ranked world number 338, she is, at the time of writing, 184—take on three of the world’s top players (Vitalia Diatchenko, Sorana Cîrstea, Markéta Vondroušová) and eviscerate each one. Then, five days after her first match, when she was the only Briton left in the singles, Raducanu’s tournament ended as dramatically as it began, when she had to bow out of her match against Ajla Tomljanovic halfway through the second set, after she started experiencing difficulties with her breathing. It was a crushing disappointment for Raducanu and her new legion of fans. But no matter: she had already claimed the hearts of the British public, arguably the hardest-to-win prize of all.

“At one point mid-game, I just let my racket go because I just didn’t believe I made that shot,” she says two weeks later, shaking her head, still in disbelief. Throughout the tournament, her sheer, unabashed enjoyment of the game was, she believes, “genuinely shining through,” which is one of the reasons she thinks she got the public on side so quickly—“and also the fact that I feel I relate to the younger audience, you know, who are still in school.” Until a few months ago, Raducanu was too. She’s still awaiting her A-level results when we meet, and the night before her Vogue shoot, she was dressed up to the nines on a golf course in Orpington at her school prom (she attended a nearby grammar, the same, coincidentally, as another of Britain’s superstar athletes, Dina Asher-Smith) surrounded by her proud, gobsmacked classmates. To them, Raducanu laughs, she is still the “kid from year seven,” the “quiet one who didn’t really raise her hand.”

Trying to reconcile the young woman in front of me leaping through the air in an Alexander McQueen gown – the same one that I watched whip up the crowd on Centre Court, enjoying shouts of “It’s coming home, Emma!”– with the image that she paints of herself as the shy schoolgirl, is nigh on impossible. “I think the confidence comes from just inner belief,” Raducanu says, tucking into a lunch of tuna and salad in a break between photos. “My mum comes from a Chinese background, they have very good self-belief. It’s not necessarily about telling everyone how good you are, but it’s about believing it within yourself. I really respect that about the culture.”