No more fairytales.
Emma Raducanu’s reign as US Open champion is over, brought to an end by the variety, craft and experience of the French veteran Alizé Cornet in the opening round at Flushing Meadows.
For the British teenager who enchanted New York last year, romping to the title without dropping a set – just three months after leaving school, and with a world ranking of 150 – it was the most vertiginous of comedowns. With her 6-3, 6-3 defeat, Raducanu relinquished not only her title but also the 2,040 points that came with it – a privation that will send her ranking tumbling from 11th to somewhere in the 80s.
Yet tennis is a brutal, relentless affair, as Raducanu has frequently been reminded over the course of a sobering first full season as a professional, and there are no shortcuts to success. Cinderella stories are illusory, magic ephemeral. Raducanu took the express route to the sport’s pinnacle; now she must do the hard miles.
No one has a firmer appreciation of these realities than Raducanu herself. For the past year, she has lived under the type of scrutiny normally reserved for athletes of twice her age and attainment. Despite the bitterness of an early loss, the upside is that she can now concentrate on honing her craft, unencumbered by the weight of her own achievement.
“Obviously really disappointing, [I’m] really sad to leave here,” said Raducanu. “It’s probably my favourite tournament. But also, in a way [I’m] happy because it’s a clean slate. I’m going to drop down the rankings. Climb my way back up. In a way, the target will be off my back slightly. I just have another chance to claw my way back up there.”
It was a characteristically healthy perspective from a player who has acquired a knack for handling setbacks with grace and maturity. Raducanu has lost 19 of her 34 matches since last year’s career-defining run in New York, but rarely has she been handed a less enviable opening-round draw. On a blustery, challenging night, the battle-hardened Cornet had the deeper toolbox and the big-stage savvy to utilise it, frequently finding answers to questions that Raducanu had barely formulated.
When her serve went awry, Cornet adjusted with greater spin and margin. When her focus slipped early in the second set, allowing Raducanu to seize a 3-1 lead, the 32-year-old rapidly regained her composure. She chipped, she chopped, she bluffed; she scrapped and scrambled, conjuring some exquisite lobs and, as the contest wore on, a sequence of drop shots that were as deft in execution as they damaging in consequence.
The match marked Cornet’s 63rd consecutive grand slam appearance, an open-era record, and her resourcefulness was evident throughout. That has been very much the story of the world No 40’s season, the highlights of which have included a first major quarter-final at January’s Australian Open, where she defeated a pair of former world No 1s in Garbine Muguruza and Simona Halep, and a run to the fourth round of Wimbledon, where she ended Iga Swiatek’s 37-match unbeaten streak.
“I guess it’s just called maturity,” said Cornet of her Indian summer. “You have to wait for it. It came this year.
“Maybe because I know [this] is, like, my last year, my last two years, that I won’t have the chance to play so many slams after that, I’m really trying to soak in the moment, to enjoy it, to have fun, to take the energy out of the crowd.
“Sometimes, I’m [seeing things at a] distance when I’m playing: ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to miss it so much in the future. It’s going to be great memories. Don’t let your nerves get in the way, just enjoy.’ That’s how I handle my emotion a bit better, and I think it helps my tennis overall.”
It is an outlook from which Raducanu could learn much. Enjoyment has been hard to come by for Bromley’s best these past 12 months, but there were signs that she was recovering her mojo earlier this month in Cincinnati, where she claimed resounding wins over Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka. This, though, was no night for fun. Cornet spoke afterwards of trying to enjoy each slam as though it might be her last, but her evident frustration in the heat of battle told a different story.
Both women struggled to come to terms with the gusty conditions and, despite the occasional flashing winner, errors were frequent. It was a night when the outcome would be determined by consistency rather than quality, and when Raducanu double faulted in the eighth game to concede her third break of the evening, Cornet sensed her chance. Serving for the set, the Frenchwoman tossed away her racket in disgust after falling behind, but she steadied herself with a combination of strong serving and artful point construction. A blazing forehand pass carried the Frenchwoman to set point, before she outsteadied Raducanu to seize the initiative.
It was the first set Raducanu had conceded in New York, and worse was to come. Having received treatment for a blister on her right hand – “You tape it up and move on,” she said afterwards – the champion was immediately broken as Cornet snuck in to tuck away a volley. Raducanu responded with her finest passage of the night, striking her groundstrokes with length and precision as she reeled off three consecutive games. But Cornet swiftly steadied herself, and after turning touch artist to reclaim the break with a drop shot, she would not be caught again.
Raducanu was not the only former champion to make a swift departure in the face of a difficult draw. Naomi Osaka, twice a winner in New York, fell 7-6 (7-5), 6-3 to Danielle Collins, the 19th-seeded American who reached the Australian Open final earlier this year. It marked a welcome return to the winners’ circle for Collins, who has been out since early July with a neck injury.
“I’m just really still kind of speechless, in a way, because I took the summer off,” said Collins, who had lost her three previous meetings with Osaka. “To come out here, play a tough opponent first round, someone that’s won two grand slams here, it’s not easy.”
Rafael Nadal opened his challenge for a fifth US Open title with a 4-6, 6-2, 6-3, 6-3 over Rinky Hijikata, an exuberant 21-year-old Australian ranked 198th in the world. Hijikata, a wildcard competing in the main draw of a grand slam for the first time, seized the opening set with a bold display of ball-striking before Nadal took control to win in three hours and eight minutes.
“Things are not perfect when you are not competing very often, when you come back from injury,” said Nadal. “You need to be humble enough to go through this process and accept that you need to fight, and you need to accept that you [are] going to suffer. That’s what I did today. I am able to play again in two days, and I hope to play better.”