WE’VE ARRIVED AS MAJOR FORCE IN TENNIS WORLD
No other nation can match the stable of young stars representing Canada
After Bianca Andreescu won her third-round match over the weekend at the U.S. Open, the teenager from the Greater Toronto Area, was asked a question about raising the profile of Canadian tennis.
To which, I couldn’t help thinking, didn’t that happen already?
It was, after all, just five years ago when Eugenie Bouchard and Milos Raonic had reached the final stages of Grand Slam events and climbed into the top 10 of their respective rankings, something no Canadian woman or man had managed before. People were talking and writing about Canada’s emergence as a tennis nation.
Like, for example, this quote from Daniel Nestor, the doubles legend: “We’re a tennis country now.”
I remember this comment well because he said it to me. We were in a small interview room at Wimbledon in 2015, where neither Bouchard nor Raonic had made it to the second week, but Vasek Pospisil, then 25, did. Nestor talked about how cool it was that Canada had a couple of men who had reached the upper echelon of the singles circuit, something not many countries could claim.
Half a decade later, the story is even more promising.
Well past midnight on Monday, Andreescu emphatically underlined the country’s tennis ascendance with another win, this one over American Taylor Townsend in a match that required her to stare down a hostile crowd in the cauldron of Arthur Ashe Stadium. It sent her into the quarter-finals of a Grand Slam for the first time in her short career and built on the promise of her spectacular rookie season.
But she’s not the only Canadian with an eye on reaching the sport’s top tier.
Denis Shapovalov lost one of the signature matches of the U.S. Open so far, falling in a five-set war on Saturday to Gael Monfils, the No. 13 seed from France, in a spectacular back-and-forth display of shotmaking, intensity and emotion. It was a match that had tennis analysts all over Billie Jean King National Tennis Center gushing about the play on the Louis Armstrong Stadium court in front of an increasingly raucous crowd. And it was a reiteration that Shapovalov, the 20-year-old who also is from the GTA, wasn’t an apparition when he exploded onto the scene in 2017, reaching the final in Montreal and then the fourth round at the U.S. Open.
Though he’s scuffled at times over his first two full professional seasons, Shapovalov said in New York he’s found his fire for competitive tennis again. It was on brilliant display Saturday night, when he fought back from 1-4 in the fourth set to level the match and push it to a fifth, won by Monfils with near-flawless play. Shapovalov flashed skill, his absurd range, and a tremendous helping of moxie.
As it stands, Shapovalov should be in the low 30s of the ATP rankings when they’re updated after New York. Raonic, who has been fighting injuries for a couple of seasons, is ahead of him in the table, as is Felix Auger-aliassime, who is inside the top 20 despite a firstround pasting at the hands of Shapovalov last week.
The list of other countries that have three men ranked as high as 32nd in the world is as follows: France. That’s the entire list. Not Britain, not Australia, not Spain, not Russia, not even the United States.
This is unprecedented for Canada and it should last. Raonic is still just 28 and is possessed of the game — and howitzer serve — to keep him playing deep into tournaments if he can have a sustained period of good health. The other two guys are just kids.
Shapovalov has been working with a new coach, Russian Mikhail Youzhny, and the extra voice has helped him to his best results in several months.
Auger-aliassime, 19, had assumed the mantle of next big thing, and though he sounded a little lost after Shapovalov, his good friend, flattened him here, a swoon is understandable for someone in their first full ATP season. He has played more than 45 matches without much of a break. He’s the betting favourite to be the best Canadian ever on the men’s side, although Shapovalov’s latest feats in New York have made that a tougher call.
There is less uncertainty about that question on the women’s side.
While Bouchard, 25, searches for her game, Andreescu, in her first full season on the WTA Tour, just keeps piling up the accomplishments. She was injured for much of the summer and couldn’t match Bouchard’s supernova run through the Grand Slam season of 2014 — two semis and a final — but Andreescu has already passed her in career wins (two) and is closing fast on Bouchard’s best rank of No. 5 in the world.
She has said in New York she has learned important lessons about injury and recovery, and travels with a physiotherapist now to help prevent the shoulder woes that derailed her summer. The questions about her health are important, if only because no one has questions about her game. A 43-4 record in 2019 will do that.
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