The fortnight that changed everything – Emma Raducanu became a victim of her own success after her his…

Raducanu’s rise had almost no run-up. She made her WTA main-draw debut at Nottingham in June 2021, still waiting on her A-level exam results, then received a Wimbledon wildcard and reached the fourth round before retiring mid-match with breathing difficulties. Two months later she arrived in New York ranked 150th, fresh off a Challenger final in Chicago, and had to win three qualifying matches just to reach the main draw.

What followed was one of the cleanest runs in Grand Slam history. Raducanu beat Stefanie Vögele, Zhang Shuai, Sara Sorribes Tormo and Shelby Rogers without dropping a set, then dispatched Belinda Bencic and Maria Sakkari in the quarter-final and semi-final. In the final, she beat fellow teenager Leylah Fernandez 6-4, 6-3, becoming the first qualifier in tennis history, male or female, to win a major.

The scale of it is still remarkable to revisit. Ten matches, including qualifying, and not a single set lost. A ranking that jumped from 150 to 23 in a matter of weeks. A first British Grand Slam singles champion since Virginia Wade in 1977. And all of it delivered by a teenager who, by her own account, had spent the spring more focused on exams than on a tennis career.

The team that guided Raducanu through her historic US Open run did not last long. Andrew Richardson was replaced by Torben Beltz before the 2022 season, but Beltz left by April. Dmitry Tursunov then took over and helped Raducanu find some encouraging form, including wins over established top players, but that partnership was also short-lived.

More changes followed, with Sebastian Sachs and later Nick Cavaday also taking charge. The problem was not necessarily that any individual coach was the wrong choice, but that Raducanu was repeatedly changing direction at a stage when she was still developing her game and learning how to handle life on Tour.

That instability mattered even more because every change was judged against her US Open triumph. Instead of having several years to build a settled team and identity, Raducanu was constantly searching for the right formula while the British media scrutinized every decision. The coaching turnover did not explain her struggles on its own, but it added another layer of uncertainty to a career already dealing with enormous expectations.

Layered on top of the coaching changes has been an injury history that has rarely given her a full, uninterrupted season. A wrist injury disrupted 2022 badly enough to eventually require surgery, dropping her as low as No. 83 that year. In 2023 she needed surgery on both hands and an ankle, cutting her season short not long after a fourth-round run at Indian Wells had suggested her level was returning.

The pattern continued into 2026. A bone injury in her foot disrupted her pre-season training, then a post-viral illness kept her out for roughly two and a half months from early February. She returned for the end of the clay season, rehiring Andrew Richardson, the coach from her US Open run, in what read like an attempt to reconnect with the version of her game that worked. It gave her a brief lift before the latest setback arrived.

That setback proved serious. A niggle she had been managing through the grass season developed into a stress fracture in her right leg, forcing a late withdrawal from Wimbledon on the eve of the tournament. The same injury later ruled her out of the US Open as well, leaving her absent from the two majors where she has produced her best results and raising real doubts about whether she will play again before the end of 2026.

None of this means the tennis has disappeared. In 2024, Raducanu ended the season ranked No. 29 and picked up her first career top-10 wins, beating Jessica Pegula at Eastbourne and Maria Sakkari at Wimbledon. It was a sign that, injuries permitting, she could still trouble the best players in the world on her day.

2025 was, by her recent standards, a genuinely strong year. She reached her first WTA 1000 quarter-final at Miami, beating Emma Navarro and Amanda Anisimova before narrowly losing to Pegula. She made the semi-final in Washington, reached her first tour-level final since the 2021 US Open at Cluj-Napoca, and regained the British No. 1 ranking that summer for the first time since 2023. For a few months, it looked like the rebuild was finally taking hold.

Small details from that stretch mattered as much as the results. Beating top-10 players again, closing out three-set matches, backing up a good week with another one — these were the unglamorous markers of a player rebuilding trust in her own body and game, rather than chasing another headline run. It was the version of progress that rarely gets a highlight reel, but it is usually the version that lasts.

That momentum ran into 2026’s injuries almost immediately. Raducanu’s ranking climbed as high as No. 23 in March — her best position since the US Open points expired from her ranking back in September 2022 — only for the foot problem, the illness, and eventually the stress fracture to undo most of that progress. She lost her most recent final, at Queen’s Club in June, in straight sets to Donna Vekic, and hasn’t played since.

Five years after the fortnight that made her famous, Raducanu remains one of the most talked-about players in tennis without coming close to repeating what made her famous in the first place. But writing off her career would be premature. Her best tennis has never disappeared, and the progress she made in 2024 and 2025 showed that she could still climb back towards the level expected of a Grand Slam champion.

The bigger question is whether she can finally stay healthy long enough to find out how good she can still become. Raducanu’s US Open triumph gave her the ultimate prize before her career had time to build around it. Five years later, the challenge is no longer proving that she can win at the highest level. It is simply getting the uninterrupted time required to build a career capable of doing it again.