MELBOURNE, Australia — In 2020, 19-year-old Iga Swiatek won her first Grand Slam title.
The following year, 18-year-old Emma Raducanu won her first Grand Slam title.
Since then, the pair of junior Grand Slam champions have taken different paths. Swiatek added four more Grand Slam titles, and in the process remained world No. 1 for more than 100 weeks; Raducanu has yet to reach a WTA Tour final, let alone another. A major championship.
Saturday’s third-round match at the Australian Open is the most important match of Raducanu’s career since winning the 2021 U.S. Open. She reached the fourth round at Wimbledon, but she had never played a match against an opponent ranked higher than world No. 7 at a major.
Raducanu’s career record against top ten players is 2 wins and 7 losses, including 0 wins and 3 losses against Swiatek, but her last two games were against former players at Eastbourne and Wimbledon. All ten opponents won their matches. After a severely disrupted 2024, 2025 will immediately put one of the best players in the world to the test.
Swiatek and Raducanu, now 23 and 22 respectively, have taken very different trajectories en route to their first Grand Slam titles. Swiatek won multiple Grand Slam main draw matches and the Junior Wimbledon title before breaking through at Roland Garros in 2020, while Raducanu won the 2021 US Open qualifying , this is a once-in-a-lifetime moment in tennis history.
Raducanu smiled on Thursday as she talked about her breakthrough match with a 6-3, 7-5 win over friend Amanda Anisimova and a match against the world No. 2.
“I know she’s been playing since she was very young, and compared to me playing six hours a week when I was 17 or 18, it’s probably a little comical,” she told a news conference.
“I don’t think it’s the same trajectory.”
In the Wimbledon junior championship match, Swiatek met Raducanu in the quarter-finals. She won 6-0, 6-1.
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The contrast has persisted since their respective first Grand Slam titles, with Swiatek winning Grand Slams on multiple surfaces (clay and hard courts) and Raducanu either in the suddenly infinite. Be flattered by expectations or suffer the misfortune of sustained injuries. Her career has been one of constant rebuilding, and Swiatek has won at least one major in each of the past three seasons, won 22 singles titles and won the 2024 Grand Slam title after winning all her singles tournaments. The title of “Most Valuable Player” of the United Cup.
In 2022, while Swiatek won both the French Open and the US Open, Raducanu spent her first official season on the WTA Tour as a Grand Slam champion. When she first tried to complete the season as a rookie player, she had good results, reaching the semifinals once and the quarterfinals twice. By normal standards for a Grand Slam champion, their performance was poor. After Raducanu’s first-round exit at the U.S. Open, she lost 2,030 points and fell from 11th to 83rd in two weeks, ending in 75th place.
This has been a year of frequent coaching changes for Raducanu. After winning the U.S. Open with Andrew Richardson, she replaced him with Torben Beltz two months after her victory. By April 2022, Beltz was out and in was Dimitry Tursunov, who worked with Annett Kontaveit when she reached world number two.
Tursunov did not continue after a trial period of several months, telling Tennis Grand Slam that there were some “red flags” that he could not ignore. Sebastian Sachs arrived in December 2022 and stayed until June of the following year, leaving Raducanu with five coaching changes in less than two years. Richardson replaced Nigel Sears in July 2021, just two months before she won the U.S. Open.
“Anything that doesn’t necessarily work for me, I’m just brutal in terms of prioritizing myself and focusing,” Raducanu said in Melbourne on Thursday. “Anything to try and influence that, I don’t have time to do that. There’s no animosity. I just don’t want it to come in.
Coaches were asked to put together PowerPoint presentations to explain their ideas – she has always had an incredible focus and demand for excellence. Even as a junior, she looked for coaches who could help her with specific shots. She’s obsessed with the reasons for things and won’t jump on it just because someone else tells her.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today program in October 2023: “I ask my coaches a lot of questions. In some cases they can’t keep up with the questions I ask and maybe that’s the end of it. reason.
Beltz was brought in to improve her forehand, and when that didn’t happen, Raducanu saw little point in continuing.
Emma Raducanu and Dimitry Tursunov at the 2022 U.S. Open (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
A big moment in Raducanu’s next rebuild will come in late 2023, when she hires Nick Cavaday as coach. The two worked together when Raducanu was a junior and discussed a possible partnership early in her senior career, but the timing was not set in stone for either party. He joins her staff toward the end of a 2023 season that has been dominated by another recurring theme in her career: injuries.
She missed most of the season after surgery on both wrists and ankles, meaning she played in just five games and ended her season in April. While Raducanu was in the early stages of recovery, Swiatek won her third French Open title, her second in two years and fourth Grand Slam title.
Cavaldi is still in place 13 months later, an eternity compared to her previous coaching tenure. Raducanu responded to his clear thinking and communication style with a focus on providing evidence and data to support his statements. Cavadi’s technical expertise also allows them to handle specific shots, particularly the forehand and serve, which has been a key factor in Raducanu’s previous coaching decisions.
The forehand was very powerful at this year’s Australian Open, but the latter needs improvement. Raducanu will face her rivals on Saturday against a more consistent side, with Swiatek set to ease into life alongside Wim Fiset. Fiset, who has coached former world No. 1 players Naomi Osaka, Kim Clijsters and Angelique Kerber to a combined six Grand Slam titles, hopes to bring Swiatek back to that devastating but capable The controlled aggression that allowed her to dominate the sport. She suffered a succession of similar defeats under former coach Tomas Viktorowski, falling into an over-hitting mess against top opponents and looking like she still had a long way to go.
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Swiatek has yet to lose to Raducanu; Raducanu has yet to win a set against her. The Briton moved her ranking up from No. 285 at the start of the season to No. 58 at the end of 2024, their third meeting in 2024. She met Swiatek in the quarterfinals of the WTA 500 Stuttgart, with Swiatek winning 7-6(2), 6-3.
Raducanu entered the competition as a wild card because she is a brand ambassador for Porsche, which is also a sponsor of the event. Later this year, Raducanu posted a picture of herself driving a £100,000 Porsche Cayenne, following rumors that the company had withdrawn the money they gave her when she was spotted riding a public bus in London. One of her cars. In December, Raducanu told a small group of reporters that she would reduce the number of sponsorship days.
She also took that result into the fourth round at Wimbledon last year, but decided to withdraw from her mixed doubles match with retired Andy Murray before the fourth round to protect her wrist, which left her Achievements are overshadowed.
Raducanu felt she had no choice. Murray was completely devastated. His mother Judy called it “amazing” on social media. Raducanu has received a lot of criticism for doing what most players would do in the same situation, but she said tennis “doesn’t feel different at all” when asked about Murray’s absence from the US Open. She added that the way tennis works means that even if someone like Murray moves on it’s “old news the next day”.
Even without that incident, Raducanu faces challenges in connecting with the wider sporting public. In Melbourne, she spoke about Murray’s situation in a less matter-of-fact way than before.
“Later, I sent him a long message that basically said: ‘If I cause any trouble at Wimbledon, that’s the absolute last thing I want,'” she told a small group of reporters.
“He’s someone I’ve always looked up to growing up, and I don’t want to have any bad feelings or bad feelings with him.”
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Raducanu is aware of the importance of an athlete’s public image and met with a group of British journalists in December for interviews and an informal lunch in which she explained some of her goals for 2025. “I think I can become one of the best players in tennis,” said Sharapova and Naomia Osaka. “I think he’s really going to help with that.
At the time, Raducanu had only been back for a few months after spraining ligaments in his ankle in early September. She also went through a tricky stretch before that, choosing not to try to qualify for the U.S. Open pre-hard court event and then arriving at the U.S. Open undercooked.
In her pre-fight press conference, Raducanu talked about how good she felt, but after losing to Sofia Kenin, Raducanu cried during her post-fight duties. “I feel depressed, I feel sad,” she said.
Raducanu arrived in Melbourne under similar circumstances, suffering back spasms while tying her shoes, causing her to arrive at the Australian Open without any match training.
Her two wins so far against No. 26 seed Ekaterina Alexandrova and former Roland Garros semifinalist Amanda Anisimova, though scrappy , but also able to seize opportunities when necessary. She has won her past eight tiebreaks, including two against Alexandrova. Her adjusted serve has been inconsistent, but she’s relied on her ground game and addressed her physical issues to resolve her service issues. Trailing Anisimova 3-0 in the second set, Raducanu received treatment on her back before winning seven of the next nine games to win the match.
Emma Raducanu has impressed in her first two games in Melbourne. (Shi Tang/Getty Images)
Her defensive tennis was outstanding against Anisimova, as she drove across the baseline and forced another shot into an error from her increasingly inconsistent opponent.
“I was able to get to some balls that maybe I couldn’t before,” Raducanu said afterward.
When asked about the different paths they’ve taken over the past few years, Swiatek was philosophical. “Everyone’s story is different and everyone is struggling with different things,” she said at a news conference Thursday.
There was an expectation that Swiatek would be too strong, but being able to compete against the best players in the world feels like an important step for Raducanu.
“When we go out there, whoever plays better wins, that’s it,” Swiatek said.
(Top photo: Robert Prange/Getty Images)
