Tennis Career Graveyard: Bianca Andreescu — From US Open champion to a career defined by injury

There was a three-week stretch in the summer of 2019 when Bianca Andreescu looked less like a rising prospect and more like the WTA's next dominant force. In the space of six months she went from a wildcard entry at Indian Wells to a Grand Slam champion, beating Serena Williams in New York to become the first Canadian in history to win a major singles title. She was 19 years old, ranked No. 4 in the world, and appeared to be at the start of a career that could define an era.

Seven years on, Andreescu is still playing professional tennis, but almost none of it has gone the way that summer promised. Her story is not really about a decline in form — it is about a body that has rarely let her find out how good she still is. Injuries, surgeries and long absences have interrupted her career so completely that she has spent more of the last seven years working her way back onto tour than actually competing on it.

Andreescu turned professional in 2017 and spent her first full seasons working through qualifying draws, without the kind of junior résumé that usually precedes a major breakthrough.

That changed almost overnight in 2019. She opened the year by battling through a three-set, near three-hour first-round win at the Australian Open, then carried that form into the spring, arriving at Indian Wells as a wildcard. She left as champion, beating Angelique Kerber in three sets to become the first wildcard ever to win the tournament and claim her maiden WTA Tour title.

Toronto followed in August, where Andreescu beat Serena Williams in the final after Williams retired with back spasms, becoming the first Canadian to win the event since 1969.

Then came New York. Playing in her US Open main-draw debut, Andreescu dropped only one set across seven rounds, beating former world No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki in the third round and 2019 sensation Taylor Townsend in the fourth before setting up a final rematch with Williams. She won 6-3, 7-5, tying Monica Seles' Open Era record for the fewest Grand Slam appearances needed to win a title — a mark broken two years later by Emma Raducanu.

By that point, Andreescu's 2019 run was practically unparalleled in the Open Era. She had won two WTA 1000 titles in just four appearances and added a US Open title in her fourth Grand Slam appearance, having made her main-draw debut in New York that same year. She finished the season with a 37-7 record, winning three titles from four finals in just 10 tournaments.

The trouble started almost immediately. Andreescu never got to defend her US Open crown; a knee injury suffered at the start of 2020, in the Auckland final against Williams, kept her sidelined into the pandemic shutdown, and by the time tennis resumed she still wasn't fit enough to travel to New York. The 2020 season that should have been her coronation as the tour's new No. 1 essentially disappeared, with her level fading alongside the Tour's COVID-19 suspension.

2021 was worse. Andreescu stepped away from the sport for most of the year, later explaining that the isolation of the pandemic combined with a family illness had become too much to manage alongside professional tennis.

When she returned, it was as a fringe top-100 player rather than a reigning major champion, and the pattern that would define the rest of her career was already forming: a promising run, followed by another physical setback. She was only 21 and appeared to have plenty of time to turn things around — something she has still been unable to do to this day.

Unlike many entries in the Tennis Career Graveyard, Andreescu's story was never really about a loss of form, confidence or tactical edge. It has been almost entirely physical. Since 2019 she has been sidelined by knee, shoulder, back, ankle and foot injuries, at various points losing months or entire seasons. A stress fracture in her back forced her out of the US Open in both 2022 and 2023.

A nine-month absence followed later in 2023 and into 2024. An emergency appendectomy in early 2025 cost her roughly six more months. Andreescu's bad luck has been remarkable: in August 2025, while serving at match point to close out a first-round win over Barbora Krejcikova at her home tournament in Montreal, she turned her ankle so badly that she was left in tears on court, later admitting that she found herself asking why it kept happening to her. She finished the match but had to withdraw before her next one.

Every comeback brought genuine signs of her old level — a run to the fourth round in Rome in 2025 that included wins over Rybakina and Vekic, as well as a Hopman Cup title alongside Felix Auger-Aliassime — but none lasted long enough to translate into sustained results.

She went more than 2,300 days without winning another title of any kind after New York, finally breaking the drought in 2026 not on the WTA Tour but at a $35,000 ITF event, for a winner's cheque of roughly $3,000 — less than a tenth of one percent of what she earned for the US Open alone. The following months showed glimpses of good tennis, with deep runs at ITF tournaments as she rebuilt her confidence away from the spotlight of the top level.

That 2026 restart has been unusually humble for a Grand Slam champion. Coming into the year ranked outside the top 200, Andreescu chose to rebuild through the World Tennis Tour rather than lean on wildcards, working her way back up through WTA 125 events and qualifying draws before returning to the main WTA Tour in March.

Over the last couple of seasons, she has been forced to play Grand Slam qualifying whenever she has been physically fit, falling in qualifying at Roland Garros and Wimbledon in 2025, and again in Paris in 2026. Things took a different turn when she returned to a Grand Slam main draw at Wimbledon after almost two years, making it through qualifying, but she was beaten in two tight tie-break sets by veteran Shuai Zhang in the first round.

The tempting counterfactual writes itself: a player who won a major on her tournament debut, in only her fourth career Grand Slam appearance, at 19 years old, beating one of the greatest players ever to do it. That kind of start has historically belonged to players who go on to collect multiple majors, not one. Andreescu has not been back to a Grand Slam quarterfinal since.

But her case sits differently from most names in this series. She has not faded away, retired quietly, or slipped into media work. At 26, she is still out there qualifying into WTA 125 draws and grinding through ITF tournaments most Grand Slam champions would never set foot on again, chasing the ranking points to get back to the tour level she once dominated.

Whether that rebuild ever produces another deep major run is genuinely unclear. What is clear is that Andreescu's career has not been a story of talent fading with time — it has been a story of talent that was rarely given the uninterrupted stretch of health it needed to show what it could still do.