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“I am very independent and I think now I’m actually just listening to myself and my intuition more,” said Emma Raducanu, smiling, from one of the few quiet corners of the vast, handsome Foro Italico complex in Rome. “For so long, I’ve had other opinions, I’ve tried to justify my gut feeling because my brain is very logical [and] I didn’t feel like I could just trust what I felt.”
Raducanu was speaking before her first-round appearance at the Italian Open, where she is still trying to figure out how to adapt her game to clay. Looking at the bigger picture of the 22-year-old’s career and life, she has reached an interesting inflection point.
Two years after surgeries to both wrists and an ankle forced her out for eight months, and then after spending the 2024 season trying to re-establish her position on the WTA Tour, Raducanu has settled in and around the top 50. She has enjoyed some encouraging results, but they have been paired with injuries, poor form and unorthodox decisions. Being one of the 50 best players in the world is an achievement in itself, but it remains to be seen if she can rise higher.
Raducanu has come to the conclusion that any further success will come by prioritising balance in her personal life rather than overworking herself with a singular focus in pursuit of her goals. In her search for stimulation and positive reinforcement away from the court, Raducanu intends to recommit to studying.
Academics have always played a large role in Raducanu’s life. A significant reason for her 16-month lay off between February 2020 and June 2021, which had started with the Covid pandemic, was because she was prioritising her A-level studies. She finished them with an A* in maths and A in economics. Now she would like to study English, politics or physics.
“Whether I will take my third A-level and go into a degree, I’m not sure,” she said. “But I feel like I need some sort of pressure and adrenaline in that sense of my life. I think it’ll be a good escape because, growing up, I always had tennis as escape from studying and studying as an escape from tennis. So it wasn’t just my entire life and my entire personality was dependent on this one thing.”
Although Raducanu’s independence has played an essential role in her success, she understands that it is a double-edged sword. She does not easily confide in people around her or share her burdens with others.
“I’m someone who keeps things to myself and it takes a lot for me to open up,” she said. “I haven’t really opened up to many people in my life, truly, but the ones that I really trust, I do. And I think the thing is with me, once I let someone in, I let them in fully and I care for them so much, and I have been burnt a few times.
“A few people who I’ve really trusted have surprised me, but I guess that’s life, and I still have some great people around me who I really trust, and I’m working on it. I mean, part of me doesn’t like talking too much about any problems, because it makes it into a bigger problem. So I think now I’m learning to just kind of accept the day as it comes and just choose discipline over how I feel.”
That tendency to keep her problems to herself has naturally been furthered by her difficulties over the past three-and-a-half years as her early success brought scrutiny, attention and criticism that has been impossible to avoid.
“The last few years, it’s been very difficult for me to trust new people, especially those who have not necessarily known me from the years before the US Open,” she said. “I just find myself gravitating towards those people now who I’ve known, and I’d say my circle is smaller than ever. And I was so sheltered. Up to 18, I was just with my parents, they helped me with everything, like nothing could touch me. All of a sudden, after that, everyone came and I got burnt quite a lot of times, whether that’s professionally or personally. Now I’m just like very Fort Knox with who I let in.”
As in Miami and Madrid, Raducanu is accompanied in Rome by Mark Petchey and Jane O’Donoghue. Considering Petchey worked with her in 2020 and she views O’Donoghue akin to a big sister, both reflect her tendency to look towards familiar faces.
The collaboration with Petchey remains a particularly interesting arrangement as he fits her around his broadcaster schedule. The start of their collaboration, which came shortly after Raducanu ended her trial partnership with Vladimir Platenik in Miami, is reflective of their unusual ad-hoc dynamic.
“Mark was already there, commentating, and it happened that I bumped into him in one of the corridors in Miami and the Dolphins Stadium,” she said. “He’s someone that I trust. So we were just talking. And then I was like: ‘I need to do this.’ It was me being scared to ask: ‘Can you help?’ And it was him not wanting to push himself. So I was just like: ‘Oh, can you maybe help me?’ And he said ‘I can help you around the commitments and stuff.’ That’s how it started. Ran into each other in the corridor.”
On the court in Rome, Raducanu will continue her clay-court season with a first-round match against a qualifier or lucky loser. How she comports herself away from her profession will play a significant role in her overall progress over the coming months.
