It is back to the drawing board for Emma Raducanu after her embarrassing first-round defeat at the US Open. Raducanu crashed out of the tournament, losing by two sets to one, to Sofia Kenin, a player ranked outside the top 50. A tearful Raducanu admitted after the match that her preparation for the tournament was wrong and that she didn’t played enough matches in the run-up to the Grand Slam. The bigger mystery is how quickly Raducanu’s tennis career is unravelling, increasingly dogged by questions and controversy. Just three years ago – after her surprise triumph in the US Open took the tennis world by storm – she was widely predicted to dominate the game for the foreseeable future. It all seems so long ago. Since then, she has not won a single tennis match at the US Open: she fell to defeat in the first-round in 2022, and missed last year’s tournament as she recovered from wrist and ankle surgery.
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