Victoria Mboko didn’t even have a picture on the Women’s Tennis Association, WTA, website before the Canadian Open in Montreal. Now, the 18-year-old has defeated four-time grand slam champion Naomi Osaka in the first WTA Tour final of her career.
Mboko had to come from behind in the 2-6, 6-4, 6-1 victory to cap off a sensational run in her home country. She is just the third Canadian in the Open Era to win the tournament after Faye Urban in 1969 and Bianca Andreescu in 2019.
“These past two weeks have been insane,” said Mboko, per Reuters. “Even getting the wild card to play here … I was super happy to be playing in Montreal for the first time ever. I just remember feeling nervous, but really taking in the moment as much as I possibly could.”
Playing on the biggest stage of her career to date, Mboko had to show enormous composure to win her first title, converting eight of her nine break points against Osaka.
Having started the year ranked No. 333 in the world, she is now set to rise to No. 34 – climbing 55 places since the start of the tournament.
And the teenager had to do it the hard way, defeating four former grand slam champions on the way to the title: Osaka, Elena Rybakina, Coco Gauff and Sofia Kenin.
In her semifinal against 2022 Wimbledon champion Rybakina, Mboko saved a match point and was forced to take a medical timeout for a wrist injury all within the third set before recording a 1-6, 7-5, 7-6(4) comeback win.
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With that, she became the first Canadian to dispatch three grand slam champions in a single WTA Tour event in the Open Era.
She was also the youngest Canadian woman to reach the final of the country’s hallmark tournament and only the fourth to ever do so.
Add to that, Mboko was only the third wild card to reach the Canadian Open women’s final, joining the likes of former world No. 1s Monica Seles, who did it in 1995, and Simona Halep, who achieved the feat in 2015, per the WTA. Not bad company to be in.
At the end of 2024, Mboko’s ranking was at No. 350, while she reached her highest ranking of No. 85 late last month.
Her only other experience of playing in a final came at the Parma Open, a lower-tier WTA 125 tournament, where she finished runner-up in May.
“No words can even describe how I feel right now,” Mboko said, smiling, after her semifinal victory. “You know, nothing would’ve ever prepared me to be in the final. If you would’ve told me last year that I was gonna be in the final here, I would’ve said, ‘You’re crazy,’”
North Carolina born, Toronto raised
Born August 26, 2006, in North Carolina to parents who had emigrated from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the late 1990s, Mboko’s family moved to Toronto when she was a child. The youngest of four siblings, she picked up her own racket at the age of three having been inspired by her three tennis-playing siblings, according to the WTA.
And in a full circle moment, the 18-year-old told the WTA earlier this summer that she used to attend the Canadian Open with her brothers and sister as a child.
Her family’s support is a driving factor in her young career; in fact, Mboko will look for them in the stands when she feels nervous. “Family brings us a sort of comfort that like no one else can kind of replicate,” she said in a WTA feature.
Known for her powerful play and movement on the court, it’s Mboko’s mentality that seems well beyond her 18 years.
“I’ve been in situations where the score was tight and I kind of panicked a little bit, but I really wanted to calm myself down and just forget about the last point and always focus on the next,” she said about rallying back in her semifinal victory.
2017 US Open champion Sloane Stephens is enthusiastic about Mboko’s future having watched her at this year’s French Open, telling CNN Sports: “I want her to have all the resources she possibly can to be the best player she can be.
“We see her now … I think she can be a grand slam champion. I think she could probably be number one in the world.”
Reported by CNN
