If you watched any of Emma Raducanu’s Tuesday match against Karolina Muchova, it was probably only the two clips, stitched together neatly for the news highlights. Raducanu approaching the umpire. Raducanu wiping away tears with a towel.
An emotional Raducanu is an instant headline, although this wasn’t a case of injury or frustration. Having seen a man in the crowd whose off-court behaviour had already concerned her, she was doing the sensible thing and reporting it. The Daily Mail reported that she was “reduced to cowering behind the umpire’s chair”. What a brilliantly multi-purpose use of language: paternalistic readers can get heroically angry on her behalf while the others write her off as a snowflake.
Raducanu’s upset was understandable. She has been stalked before, as have plenty of women’s tennis players. Last year Katie Boulter shared her experiences of being followed home, and of a man issuing violent online threats while he attended a tournament in which she was competing. “Things like this happen all the time,” she said.
Danielle Collins may seem to have a thick hide on court – witness her performative antics at last month’s Australian Open – but she is “vigilant and cautious” in her real life after being stalked multiple times, both online and in person. “Sometimes that has come across to fans as being withdrawn, distant,” she says, “but … sometimes I’ve had to be more careful about what I say and do because I don’t want certain people knowing where I am.”
Sloane Stephens, speaking a couple of years ago, said that “all of us as athletes … we’ve gotten these crazy messages for years. We completely normalised being called names and death threats”. When someone posted her own address and told her: “I’m gonna be there tomorrow,” her fellow US player Madison Keys had to persuade her to contact the FBI.
We tend, when we hear these stories, to focus on the obsession, the creepiness, the extremity of behaviour. The guy who hid in Chris Evert’s closet for three days, smoking cigarettes. The guy who wanted Anna Kournikova to save him from drowning. The guy who harassed Serena Williams then moved on to torment a French punk singer. It can feel like a very distant problem, an irresolvable mental health issue, the price of being talented, famous and female.
Nothing to do, then, with the screeds of social media abuse those same women’s tennis players receive on a daily basis from gamblers who have lost money on their games. And a separate issue, still, from the drive-by haters who just want to register their opinion that Caroline Garcia is a clown, or Coco Gauff is a traitor to America.
