Bianca is back (again)
She burst on to the tennis scene with skill and swagger and what seemed like unlimited potential. Five years later, Bianca Andreescu just needs a normal season
Five years ago this fall, I went to New York for the U.S. Open. The Grand Slams of tennis are tricky events to cover if your interest is limited to certain players, because they can be knocked out early or end up competing for a full two weeks. I once went to the U.S. Open to cover the Canadians midway through the tournament, arriving on Labour Day, and promptly saw Eugenie Bouchard lose in the afternoon and Milos Raonic lose that night.
I had the hotel booked for a couple more nights, so I went back and covered a Roger Federer match, went to a taping of the David Letterman show, and came back to Toronto the next day.
But in 2019, I went early. Bianca Andreescu was just about the hottest thing in tennis, having just won in Toronto for what was then her second victory in her rookie WTA season, and we figured there was a decent chance she wouldn’t be in the U.S. Open all that long. She had just come back from an injury layoff, the win in Toronto had set off a media whirlwind, it seemed like she was running on fumes. I booked a hotel in Manhattan for a week and figured if I had to extend my stay I would figure that out later. It’s not like the place is lacking for hotels.
She won the whole damn thing, of course. In the fourth round, Andreescu played an unseeded American, Taylor Townsend, in the last match at the giant Arthur Ashe Stadium that night. Those matches are surreal. They often don’t start until past 10 p.m., and so most of the corporate box-suite crowd has gone home and it’s only the die-hards, many of them quite soused, who remain. Andreescu won the first set but dropped the second, and the New York crowd was suddenly rooting for the American upset. I started to look at the options for a flight home. In the third set, Andreescu promptly ripped off something like four straight games to seize control and quiet the haters. I started to look for options for a hotel.
That’s how I spent that last week in New York. Book hotel for a night or two, go to an Andreescu match, watch her pull out a win, book different hotel for the next night. One morning, I wheeled my suitcase out of the hotel, and went next door, where I had booked for that night. There are, as mentioned, a lot of hotels in Manhattan.
The other thing about that fortnight that sticks in the memory is how Andreescu was just a wide-eyed kid. She talked about going to the New York subway and looking for rats, she talked about bad breakups and good music, and when one of her wins meant she had cracked the top-ten of the WTA rankings, she squealed and swore upon finding out, and apologized for swearing. But that kid was also an undeniable talent. She was a power player who was also aggressively creative, mixing in lobs and drop shots and hitting from weird angles. And she had an uncanny knack for winning the big points. By the time she was trading punches with Serena Williams in the final and silencing an absolutely teeming Ashe Stadium, it longer was surprising. She told the crowd afterward that she was sorry she had won, but the tone said she wasn’t sorry at all. It felt then like it was only a matter of time — like, a few months, probably — until she was the top-ranked player in the world.
That didn’t happen, of course. An injury later that fall ended her hot streak and kicked off a years-long cycle of recovery, rehabilitation, comebacks, injuries and more of the same. She’s had flashes of her old self, like when she made the final in Miami in 2021, but in that match she blew a tire and couldn’t finish. Adding to the injury problems, she lost confidence and has said she started paying too much attention to random idiots on the internet — never a good idea for an athlete. Andreescu took six months away from the sport at the start of the 2022 season, then returned to say she felt good about tennis again. She had a rare run of good health through last spring, suffered a nasty ankle sprain in Miami that saw her wheeled from the court in tears, but then came back relatively quickly and resumed playing. By August, she was out again with a back injury that has kept her from playing for eight months, until her return this week at Roland Garros. She won her first match and is scheduled to play her second on Thursday evening in Paris, although so far the weather has messed up the scheduling.
Expectations are understandably low. Andreescu is now ranked 228th in the world, which is what happens when you can’t play, which means she will face tougher opponents earlier in tournaments as she continues this latest comeback. But she is still just 23 years old. She still has all that talent. It would be wonderful to see what happens if she could just have something approaching a normal, healthy season. For once.