Victoria Mboko's debut run at Wimbledon was a great story, as the Canadian got in as a lucky loser and advanced out of the first round. The story came to an end on Thursday, as she fell to American Hailey Baptiste in second-round play.Dave Shopland/The Associated Press
The future of Canadian tennis may always be bright, but the present has become pretty lacklustre.
On Thursday, the last Canadian competitors were eliminated from Wimbledon’s singles competition. The most disappointing of them was Victoria Mboko.
Mboko, 18, is the sort of athlete people are primed to root for -- great backstory, great personality, brand new face. Her breakout at the French Open in May put everyone on alert for the next Eugenie Bouchard or Bianca Andreescu.
Here at Wimbledon, the script was being written for her. She’d lost in the last of her qualifying matches after being on the verge of winning several times. She was entered into the main draw after drawing one of the lucky loser spots. She was eating lunch when she got the call, and was on the court three hours later. She won that match.
In the Wimbledon film (they made one just like this) Mboko carries on, grinding her way through the rounds until she pops up late in Week 2, a new global star.
Felix Auger-Aliassime falls to Germany's Struff in second-round Wimbledon upset
As usually happens to Canadians now, that story hit a wall on Thursday. This one was in the shape of American Hailey Baptiste.
Mboko should have won at least a set. She had Baptiste spinning in place in the early going. The Canadian was up 5-2 in the first. Then, out of nowhere, it was a tiebreak, and Mboko was up 5-2 in that. That didn’t work out either.
In the second set, Mboko’s game caved in. She lost 6-7, 3-6. Felix Auger-Aliassime lost a few minutes earlier, making Mboko the last Canadian standing. It’s something, but it’s not much.
It now seems like a long time since tennis was the new Our Game of this country. Back when Bouchard and Milos Raonic were making slam finals, and Andreescu was winning one. Can you remember when Auger-Aliassime and Denis Shapovalov hit the Rogers Cup together for the first time, and it felt like we had tennis sorted for a generation at least?
Denis Shapovalov's first-round exit from Wimbledon earlier this week was his earliest since 2019.Isabel Infantes/Reuters
That moment is not long ago -- six, seven years. It only feels like ancient history.
Canadians do show up. Six of them made the main singles draw here -- that’s a major improvement over the beginning of the century. But they don’t feature. They don’t surprise. Most worryingly, they don’t interest.
It’s proof that strength does not always lead to strength, in sports or elsewhere. Nonetheless, that’s the idea that has taken hold in Canada.
That if a few of us get good at something once, we will always be good at it. Like someone has done their 10,000 hours and everybody after them can skip the first 7- or 8,000 and advance straight to mastery. It’s the sort of brain worm that’s promoted because it gets centres of excellence built.
But at the highest levels, it is more than just virtuous circles of training and funding. It’s possible to purchase a decent cohort in any sport. Producing an all-timer from the midst of them is pure luck.
Roger Federer emerged in a wave of Swiss tennis talent, but it hasn’t lasted. It’s not like there was a template to copy. Great players in individual sports are one-offs.
Canada’s swell of talent produced one finisher -- Andreescu -- and she was only able to finish once before injuries consumed her career. She’s only 25, still playing, but it feels like she retired years ago.
So if Wimbledon is the mid-season slam at which you can take stock of a national program, Canada doesn’t have much on the shelves. Enough to keep you going, but not enough to make a meal you’d invite people over for.
If American tennis can dip beneath the waves, as it’s done for most of 20 years, it’s possible that Canadian tennis can hit the ocean floor. Right now, that seems more likely than any sudden resurgence.
You could see that much on the face of Auger-Aliassime on Tuesday. He was not quite despairing after his come-from-ahead loss, but he was definitely on the downbeat side of life.
“All the other guys are improving,” he said. Like Andreescu, he is beginning to seem like an old 24.
Still a teenager, Mboko has the luxury of speaking as if everything is yet to come. After two grand slams, has she arrived?
“I actually don’t really feel that way. Everything happened so fast for me,” Mboko said.
She noodled around with an answer for about a minute -- “It’s only a matter of time to improve my training to stay with these girls” -- and about-faced.
“I feel I guess I could say I’ve arrived,” Mboko concluded.
Ah, youth.
It’s possible that the slow leak of hype out of Canadian tennis is good thing for her. Fewer expectations. If she can make a quarter-final somewhere, that would be a lot of fun.
Next year, Canadian tennis can lie fallow. Between the NHL back in the Olympics, the Leafs finally, absolutely-for-sure winning a championship and a home World Cup, there won’t be any attention to spare for mere participants.
Maybe that’s what Canadian tennis needs. Less ’Is this the year?’, and more ‘This probably isn’t the year’.
When it was at its best, you didn’t take anything that happened as a given. Every one of those moments listed above seemed remarkable. Maybe you were one of the people who got up early on a Saturday or a Sunday thinking, ‘This is new’.
As anybody would, the country got used to it. The assumption was that Shapovalov or FAA would have a major between them by now, and that Andreescu would have multiples. Instead, they’re all doing what most elite tennis players do -- reach the top 20 and struggle like hell to levitate there.
Amazingly, the greatest sign of Canada’s surge in tennis isn’t the titles won, because there haven’t been many. It’s the fact that now that we’ve fallen back to the middle. How unfair that seems.