Pro tennis has shifted away from teen queens, but the seventeen-year-old has joined the ranks of her idols and toppled them.
March 9, 2025
Photograph by Vincent Thian / AP
Shortly after Mirra Andreeva defeated Clara Tauson to win the Dubai Tennis Championships—a tournament that sits one rung below the four Grand Slams—she balanced the large metal trophy she had been given against her hips and took part in the ritual humiliations of a victory speech. Andreeva’s curly blond hair was slicked back into a braid, and sweat dotted her teal outfit. She ticked through the standard list of acknowledgements: her opponent (“You’ve been playing amazing”), her support team, her family, her coach (“I know that I can be a pain in the ass”), the crowd, her fans. Then, “last but not least,” she thanked herself. “I just want to thank me for always believing in me,” she said. She then dissolved into giggles, before recovering and thanking herself some more.
Andreeva is seventeen years old—so young that her formative experience of watching a tennis match as a child was the Australian Open final between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer in 2017. Born in Siberia, she moved to Sochi, Russia, and then to Cannes, France, to develop her game. After her title in Dubai, she reached No. 9 in the W.T.A. rankings, making her the youngest player to enter the top ten in the past eighteen years. Until the eighteen-year-old Maya Joint reached the quarterfinals of a tournament in Mexico at the end of February and shot to No. 85, Andreeva was the only teen-ager in the top hundred. And even this understates the gap between her accomplishments and those of the other youngest players on the tour. To win the title in Dubai, Andreeva had to defeat Iga Świątek, a five-time major champion known for her suffocating style, and Elena Rybakina, a Wimbledon champion with blistering power. And, when Andreeva did just that and snagged the big title, no one who’s been following women’s tennis was terribly surprised.
After all, at the Australian Open last year, Andreeva, as a sixteen-year-old, dismantled Ons Jabeur, a former Grand Slam finalist, by a score of 6–0, 6–2. Jabeur, who turned thirty last year, is one of Andreeva’s idols, and probably the player whose guileful game Andreeva’s most resembles. Another young player might have been overawed by such an opponent, but it was Jabeur, not Andreeva, who appeared stunned. Two rounds later, Andreeva fell behind Diane Parry in the third set; after a backhand error, Andreeva fiercely bit her own biceps, tattooing a perfect ring of teeth marks into her arm. Then she came back and won. This might have been an even more propitious sign of what was to come. Other young players have experienced sudden surges of success, only to regress just as quickly. But, a few months after the Australian Open, at the French, Andreeva beat Aryna Sabalenka in the quarterfinals. And she’s improved since.
Once, the story of modern women’s tennis was a story of teen phenoms: Tracy Austin winning her first Grand Slam title at sixteen; Serena Williams and Steffi Graf winning their first at seventeen, and Martina Hingis winning five before her nineteenth birthday; Monica Seles winning eight Grand Slams as a teen-ager. But such precocious success is rare now. This partly has to do with broad changes in the women’s game, which draws from a deeper pool of players who hit the ball harder than their predecessors did, which favors fully developed bodies. Whatever other advantages in raw athleticism that younger players might have over older ones are often countered by the technical and tactical skills that come with age. And many older players have been able to stave off the kinds of physical declines that typically come with aging, at least for a while. Players, these days, travel with nutritionists, physical therapists, psychologists; they lift weights and measure the minute fluctuations of their heartbeats while they sleep.
But the shift was partly produced by deliberate changes to the rules, which were designed to ward off the darker side of teen glory. Jennifer Capriati, who made her first Grand Slam semifinal at fourteen, was later caught shoplifting. Austin quit the game at twenty, before a brief comeback years later; Hingis retired, for the first time, at twenty-two. There were also controlling parents and whispers of abuse throughout the industry. And Seles, to the shock of the world, was stabbed between her shoulder blades, while on the court, by a deranged fan, when she was nineteen. Around that time, the W.T.A., the governing body of women’s professional tennis, began to restrict the number of events young players can enter before they turn eighteen. Since then, the sport has introduced additional policies intended to protect the youngest players from the intense physical and psychological demands of a high-pressure, year-round, international tour.
Nowadays, players usually turn pro intending to have longer careers than those who came before them, and they expect a lengthy runway to success. Increasingly, they play even after having children—the W.T.A. recently announced a plan for paid maternity leave. Last year, Jasmine Paolini made two Grand Slam finals for the first time, at the age of twenty-nine, and one of the game’s top Americans, Jessica Pegula, found her most consistent success in her late twenties and early thirties. In 2000, there were seventeen teen-agers in the top hundred. Now there are two. This year, at the Australian Open there were eight mothers in the main draw.
Every so often, the rules that limit the play of promising youngsters come under scrutiny. After all, Coco Gauff has come across as one of the most mature players on tour since she was fifteen years old. Does she need to be held back? Andreeva, for her part, hardly seems to require restraints on her ambition. She has a preternatural poise, an uncanny on-court intelligence, and seems to have surrounded herself with solid support. Her coach, Conchita Martínez, not only has a fantastic tactical mind but is widely considered to be a real adult—not always a given in pro tennis.
Andreeva’s run in Dubai may not have been a shock, but it was still a revelation. She has always moved remarkably well, despite not seeming extremely fast. Her instincts and awareness get her moving to the right spot before her opponent has even hit the ball, allowing her to set her feet; and she can rush her opponents without overpowering them, with precise, flat shots that absorb speed and counter it. Her consistent technique lets her disguise the intended direction of her own shots—and, more than most players, she is willing to take the ball down the line or rip a new angle. Even the threat of redirection opens up the court.
The knock on Andreeva’s game was that she lacked overwhelming power and could be hit off the court. But, by the end of last year, Andreeva was already one of the best returners on tour—a skill that relies on the kind of vision and athleticism that are hard to teach. In Dubai, she showed off the new strength of her serve, which enabled her to start points from a more aggressive position. (Andy Roddick, one of the better servers in tennis history, raved about it on his podcast.) She has hit the seventh-most aces on tour, forty-five per cent more of them than the top-ranked Sabalenka this season.
What struck me, though, was her patience, the way she blended aggression and defense, and her ability to slide into a slice, with her legs wide and her weight balanced, and then spring back toward the center of the court and hit an aggressive groundstroke. In one point against Rybakina, the kind of player who might have blasted through Andreeva only a few months ago, she hit a series of defensive shots—scooping a hard return from Rybakina off the line, then scampering to dig shots out of the corner, lofting height into one shot before slicing another, and using her chop forehand to reset the point. Finally Rybakina, who’d been firing away from the baseline, came to the net, on the offensive. But Andreeva was already racing to the right spot, and flicked a forehand that skimmed the net at a sharp angle. Rybakina could only drop her head as the ball flew past her. Again and again, Andreeva took her risks at the right moments.
Even as Andreeva was winning in Dubai, there were reminders of the troubling aspects of being a young woman, or, frankly, any person, in the panopticon of pro sports. Rybakina was playing without her longtime coach, Stefano Vukov, who had been suspended while the W.T.A investigated complaints that he had verbally abused her, according to the Athletic. (Rybakina has defended him and told others that their relationship had turned romantic, and Vukov has denied any wrongdoing.) In Dubai, Emma Raducanu, who unexpectedly won the U.S. Open in 2021, at the age of eighteen, and was vaulted to superstardom, appeared distressed when she recognized a man in the stands who had allegedly stalked her. Raducanu broke down in tears as she approached the umpire to explain the situation, then appeared to try to hide behind the umpire’s chair. The winner of a big tournament in Qatar the previous week, Amanda Anisimova, made the semifinals of the French Open as a seventeen-year-old. But, after her father died, in 2019, she played only sparingly for the rest of the year and, in 2023, took an eight-month break away from tennis, citing burnout and mental-health struggles. Her win, if nothing else, was a reminder that careers can take unexpected turns, no matter the expectations.
It’s easy to assume that experience can only help a player. But that’s not true. Andreeva has talked about the burden of the new pressure on her and the criticism of her losses, and how she has had to reframe it as a kind of hostile respect. “It helps me to go on the court with a kind of anger,” she said, before the Dubai final, “not to prove to everyone that I really can do it but to prove to myself that I’m strong enough to handle the pressure and to really win these high-quality matches.” Still, there is a kind of simplicity to her pursuit of excellence. When a reporter asked her what she intended to do with the roughly six hundred thousand dollars of prize money she’d just earned, she said, “I don’t even know what I want. Now I think about it and I feel like I have everything I ever wanted. I won the tournament. I won it.”
The thing about tennis is that there’s always another tournament to win. This week, Andreeva plays in the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells. (She plays Tauson in the third round on Sunday, in a rematch of the Dubai final.) After that it’s on to Miami, then to Europe for the start of the clay swing and the French Open, before the grass season begins. The wins will proliferate; the losses probably will, too. And so will the unruly demands and desires that come with growing up, torqued by successes and failures. For now, though, all credit to her. ♦
