Virginia Wade sees greatness in Emma Raducanu after her US Open triumph

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:

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"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."

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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.”