Victoria Mboko: The Canadian tennis talent who can’t stop winning
ROLAND-GARROS, PARIS — Ripping a backhand past a former Wimbledon quarterfinalist to clinch a first Grand Slam win on the opening day of the French Open is a pretty good way to make tennis fans stand up and take notice.
Or maybe Victoria Mboko, the 18-year-old, American-born, Canadian-raised daughter of Congolese parents, has been announcing herself for months now. Maybe folks just weren’t listening closely enough.
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Everyone is now.
As her Roland-Garros debut approached, Mboko played the same brain game she has been playing through a startling climb up the tennis biosphere. She tells herself that what is happening isn’t actually happening.
“Kind of just play it down,” she said during an interview after her 6-1 7-6(4) win over Lulu Sun of New Zealand Sunday afternoon, which earned her a second-round duel with Eva Lys of Germany.
“Pretend like you’re playing somewhere else, that you’re not at a Grand Slam. It’s another clay-court tournament. That way, I don’t put as much pressure on myself and the points. I let loose and I kind of go for my shots a little bit more.”
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If playing make-believe before walking onto the biggest stages in tennis could lead to Mboko taking a spot next to Bianca Andreescu, Leylah Fernandez, Denis Shapovalov, Felix Auger-Aliassime, Milos Raonic and others in the Canadian tennis firmament, then Mboko probably ought to keep doing it.
Her performance against Sun showed every bit of what has generated all the buzz about Mboko becoming the latest in a string of Canadians from immigrant families who have made it to the top of the sport.
“We know Canada is a very multicultural country and we are very accepting of everyone,” Andreescu, who has become a mentor to Mboko, said during an interview in Rome.
“I think it’s a beautiful thing that we’re all from different different cultures, different backgrounds, but at the end of the day Tennis Canada really has built this program in the acceptance of everybody, no matter who you are.”
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The youngest by seven years of four tennis-playing siblings, Mboko has been winning more than just about anyone in professional women’s tennis since the start of the year. She finished last year ranked 350th, with her coaches believing fully in her potential but also wanting her to take it slow, given her struggles with knee injuries in recent years.
Now they have another problem on their hands. Mboko has won so many matches that she has already played more than she has ever played before. She started the year winning 22 in a row on the ITF World Tennis Tour, two rungs below the WTA Tour. She lost one, then won another five, this time at a WTA 125 event, the next rung up, in Porto. She has won matches in Rome, Ga. and Rome, Italy at the Italian Open. Her record on the year is 41-5.
“That’s a lot,” Marko Strillic, one of three coaches she works with at the Canadian Tennis Federation, said during an interview.
“If she keeps winning, you have to figure out a way to manage the schedule so that she doesn’t get hurt. This is for the long term.”
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That was three weeks ago in Rome, before Mboko cruised through French Open qualifying to earn her main draw debut, and then knocked through Sun as though she knew she would all along. This is going to get complicated, but to the people closest to Mboko, this rocket ride both is and is not surprising.
Her oldest sister Gracia, 28, who played tennis for the University of Denver, said she and her brothers always knew that their baby sister had something they did not. Gracia recalled a local women’s tournament at their home club in Burlington, a suburb of Toronto, Ontario, that she played in when she was 17.
At the last minute, another slot opened up, and a pro at the club asked Victoria, who was just 9 and had come to watch, if she wanted to play. Victoria jumped at the opportunity and eventually faced her sister. Gracia won, 6-0, 6-0, but the way Victoria behaved, it was as though she had expected the results to go the other way.
“It’s that belief in yourself that the very top of the one percent have,” Gracia, a consultant in private equity, said Sunday after watching her sister win. “It’s: ‘not only should I win this match, I’m going to go do it.’ And then she does it.”
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At least she does now. For the past couple of years, a knee injury caused by both rapid growth and a bad fall on a tennis court has made that difficult. She spent much of last year based in Belgium at the academy of Justine Henin, the former world No. 1 and four-time French Open champion. She played little for the first six months of the year. Getting healthy was the priority.
Even then, she ended the year losing more than she won, dropping three of her last four matches.
“Last year ended very poorly,” said her brother Kevin Mboko, 27, a tennis coach in suburban Toronto who was courtside with Gracia on Sunday. “I didn’t see any of this coming. No one did.”
Their father, Cyprien, a retired mechanical engineer who worked nights in part so that he could drive his children to their tennis obligations, was there too. Victoria’s mother, Godée, an accountant, was back home, dealing with a heavy end-of-the-month workload, as was her other brother, David, a 25-year-old data scientist.
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The Mbokos moved from the Democratic Republic of Congo nearly three decades ago, to escape the First and Second Congo Wars of the mid-1990s. Visa issues kept the family separated, with Godée in Montreal and Cyprien in North Carolina. Godée then moved to N.C., where the family lived for several years and where Victoria was born, before all moving to Toronto when she was still a baby.
Victoria didn’t let the losses in the final months of 2024 get to her.
“I just thought new year, new me,” she said during an interview in Rome.
She decided to play like the version of herself that she has long believed in: an aggressive, athletic player who likes to take control of points and dictate the action. In Miami, she beat Camila Osorio, a 23-year-old tour mainstay, and pushed Paula Badosa, the No. 10 seed at Roland-Garros, to a third-set tiebreak.
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In Rome, she cruised through the first set in her second-round match against Coco Gauff, lacing backhands and forehands through the court on the Campo Centrale like a seasoned veteran. Gauff turned the match into one of her long-distance track races, getting so many balls back that Mboko was huffing and puffing between every point. But the world No. 2 came away seriously impressed. She “felt like playing myself,” Gauff said in a huddle after the match, especially with how well Mboko covered the court.
“On the movement, I would say she’s up there with me on that,” Gauff, probably the best mover in the sport, said.
Gracia Mboko said her sister came away from that loss both devastated and determined.
“She told me she was so out of steam, that she couldn’t believe how Coco was getting every ball back,” she said Sunday.
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“She kept saying, ‘I got to get in shape.’ It motivated her.”
In Paris, Mboko has also showed off a precocious variety, mixing in drop shots and slices, including a hard, slicing forehand to keep Sun off balance. Her coach is Nathalie Tauziat, who got to No. 3 in the world with a game moulded around variety. But Mboko can also crack her serve at 120 mph. Not surprisingly, she grew up worshiping Serena Williams.
Mboko said after Sunday’s win that she’d learned plenty from that loss to Gauff. She knew she had let the world No. 2’s grit frustrate her, thinking about the last point when she was supposed to be thinking about the next one. Her coaches are onto this.
“They’ll start to snap me right back into it,” she said. “They’ll actually say: ‘stay present, stay focused, or close it right here.’”
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With 41 wins in a year, Mboko isn’t exactly unfamiliar with closing it. Now she has done it on the biggest stage in the sport.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennis, Women’s Tennis
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