Emma Raducanu became the first British woman to win a grand slam since Virginia Wade in 1977 and the former player sees greatness in the young Brit.
Emma Raducanu won the 2021
US Open in sensational fashion despite nobody expecting her to do much of note at the event. It was an almost impossible thing yet it happened. Many tennis greats came out to praise Raducanu and that includes British tennis great Virignia Wade who watched the amtch from the stands. She said:
“It’s more than exceptional. It’s something that when she’s out of her tennis career she can look back and think, ‘Oh my goodness, was that really possible?’ It really is an impossible success that she’s had.”
Wade also spoke about how she sees greatness and start potential in Raducanu which is not something that comes about often:
"In tennis or in anything you can’t expect there to be a real, legitimate star every year or every two years, When you think of the young stars that there have been all the way
back to Maureen Connolly, their reputations went ahead of them – if it
was Chris Evert or Tracy Austin, and certainly Martina and Steffi."
She continued:
“Steffi was brilliant at 18. She just came on the scene and you knew
she was going to just keep going forward winning everything. And of
course Serena. You get the same sort of feeling with Emma that she’s just better
than her contemporaries and better than probably a lot of her seniors
and she’s the exception who’s going to go forward."
Wade and Raducanu shared a warm embrace after the match which was immortalized with a picture. On that, Wades said:
"I said, ‘Let’s go down and see if we can see her as she comes off
the court’. The tournament director Stacey Allaster said, ‘No, no you
can’t go down there’. We said, ‘We’re going down there’. After about 10 minutes she came off the court with all the
(security) guards and I said, ‘Emma, can we have a hug please?’ She
said, ‘Of course’, so we were all lining up for hugs. She would have
hugged the whole stadium I think. It was lovely.”