Culture
Emma Raducanu and Iga Swiatek’s Australian Open match reunites two teenage Grand Slam winners
MELBOURNE, Australia — In 2020, Iga Swiatek won her first Grand Slam title at 19.
The following year, Emma Raducanu won her first Grand Slam title at 18.
The pair of teenage major winners have followed divergent paths since then. Swiatek has added four more Grand Slam titles to her tally, spending over 100 weeks as world No. 1 in the process; Raducanu hasn’t reached the final of a single WTA Tour event, let aloneanother major.
Their Australian Open third-round match on Saturday is one of the most consequential of Raducanu’s career since winning the U.S. Open in 2021. She has gone deeper in a Grand Slam before, reaching the Wimbledon fourth round last year, but she has never played an opponent ranked higher than world No. 7 at a major.
Raducanu’s career record against top-10 players is 2-7, with an 0-3 head-to-head against Swiatek, but she has won her last two matches against top-10 opponents at Eastbourne and Wimbledon respectively. After a heavily disrupted 2024, 2025 brings an immediate test against one of the best players in the world.
Swiatek and Raducanu, now 23 and 22 respectively, took very different trajectories en route to their first Grand Slam titles. Swiatek’s breakout tournament at the 2020 French Open came on the back of numerous Grand Slam main draw match wins and a junior Wimbledon title, while Raducanu won the 2021 U.S. Open as a qualifier, a once-in-history tennis moment.
Raducanu laughed Thursday when talking about breakthroughs in the wake of beating friend Amanda Anisimova 6-3, 7-5 to set up the meeting with the world No. 2.
“I know that she was playing since a very young age and my hours in comparison were probably a bit comical when I was 17 or 18, playing six hours a week,” she said in a news conference.
“I don’t think it was the same trajectory.”
In that junior Wimbledon title run, Swiatek met Raducanu in the quarterfinals. She won 6-0, 6-1.
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The contrast has persisted since their respective first major titles, with Swiatek winning Grand Slams on multiple surfaces (clay and hard courts) while Raducanu either flattered to deceive in the wake of suddenly and infinitely increased expectations or suffered continual misfortune with injuries. Her career has been one of consistent rebuilds, while Swiatek has won at least one major in each of the past three seasons, picking up 22 singles titles and the 2024 United Cup’s “most valuable player” title after winning all of her singles matches.
In 2022, when Swiatek won both the French and U.S. Opens, Raducanu was having her first proper season on the WTA Tour — as a Grand Slam champion. Her results were good when presented as a rookie player trying to navigate a full season for the first time, with one semifinal and a couple of quarterfinals. They were less good by the normal standards of a Grand Slam champion. Raducanu ended the year ranked No. 75 after a first-round exit at the U.S. Open saw her lose 2,030 points and plummet from No. 11 to No. 83 in the space of two weeks.
It was a year of frequent coaching changes for Raducanu. Having won the U.S. Open with Andrew Richardson, she replaced him with Torben Beltz just two months after winning the title. By April 2022, Beltz was out and Dimitry Tursunov, who had worked with Annett Kontaveit while she reached No. 2 in the world, was in.
Tursunov didn’t continue beyond a trial period of a few months, telling Tennis Majors that there were “red flags” he could not ignore. Sebastian Sachs arrived in December 2022 and lasted until the following June, making it five coaches in less than two years for Raducanu. Richardson had replaced Nigel Sears in July 2021, just two months before her U.S. Open win.
“Anything that’s not necessarily serving me, I’m just pretty savage in terms of just prioritizing myself and focusing,” Raducanu said on Thursday in Melbourne. “Anything that wants to try and affect that, I don’t have time for it. No hate. I just don’t want to kind of let that in.”
Coaches are asked to put together PowerPoint presentations to explain their thinking — she has always had an incredible focus and demand for excellence. Even as a junior, she would seek out coaches who could help her with specific shots. She’s obsessed with the why of things and won’t just jump because she’s told to.
She said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in October 2023: “l ask my coaches a lot of questions. On certain occasions, they haven’t been able to keep up with the questions I’ve asked and maybe that’s why it ended.”
Beltz was brought in to improve her forehand and when that wasn’t happening, Raducanu saw little point in carrying on.
Emma Raducanu with Dimitry Tursunov at the 2022 U.S. Open (Julian Finney / Getty Images)
A big moment in the next Raducanu rebuild came at the end of 2023 when she hired Nick Cavaday as coach. The pair worked together when Raducanu was a junior and had discussed a possible partnership earlier in her senior career, with the timing on both sides not working out. He joined her team towards the end of a 2023 season that had been dominated by another recurring theme in her career: injuries.
She missed the majority of the season after double wrist surgery and an ankle operation, which together meant she played just five events and ended her season in April. While Raducanu was in the early stages of rehabilitation, Swiatek was scooping up a third French Open, her second in two years, and a fourth Grand Slam title overall.
Cavaday is still in place 13 months later, an eternity compared to how long her previous coaches have lasted. Raducanu responds to his clarity of thinking and style of communication, with a focus on offering evidence and data to support what he is saying. Cavaday’s technical expertise also allows them to work on specific shots — especially the forehand and serve — which has been a key factor in Raducanu’s previous coaching decisions.
At this year’s Australian Open, the forehand has been potent, but the latter is a work in progress. Raducanu will meet her opponent on Saturday with the more settled team, as Swiatek eases into life with Wim Fissette. Fissette has coached former world No. 1 players Naomi Osaka, Kim Clijsters and Angelique Kerber, winning six Grand Slam titles in total, and looks to be returning Swiatek to the devastating but controlled aggression that has seen her dominate the sport. Her succession of too-similar defeats under former coach Tomasz Wiktorowski, in which she descended into a tailspin of overhitting groundstrokes in the face of peaking opponents, looks a long way away.
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Swiatek is yet to suffer a defeat to Raducanu; Raducanu is yet to win a set against her. They crossed paths in 2024 for the third time after the Brit moved her ranking up from No. 285 at the start of the season to No. 58 by its close. She met Swiatek at the WTA 500 Stuttgart quarterfinal, which Swiatek won 7-6(2), 6-3.
Raducanu entered the tournament as a wildcard because she is a brand ambassador for Porsche, who also sponsor the event. Later in the year, Raducanu posted a picture of herself driving her £100,000 Porsche Cayenne after rumours spread that the company had taken back a car they’d gifted her when she was spotted taking a public bus in London. In December, Raducanu told a small group of reporters that she would cut down on sponsorship days.
Last year also brought that run to the Wimbledon fourth round, but it was overshadowed by her decision to withdraw from her mixed doubles with the retiring Andy Murray to protect her wrist ahead of her fourth-round match.
Raducanu felt she had no choice. Murray was gutted. His mother, Judy, called it “astonishing” on social media. Raducanu faced a lot of criticism for doing what most players would have done in the same situation before she said tennis “doesn’t feel different at all” when asked about Murray’s absence at the U.S. Open. She added that the way tennis works means that even someone like Murray moving on is “old news the next day.”
Even without that episode, Raducanu has faced challenges in connecting with the wider sporting public. In Melbourne, she spoke about the Murray situation in a less matter-of-fact way than previously.
“Afterwards, I sent him a long message, basically: ‘If I caused any trouble I guess at Wimbledon, that’s definitely the last thing I want,’” she told a small group of reporters.
“He’s someone that I’ve grown up looking up to and I don’t want any bad blood or harsh feelings with him.”
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Raducanu is aware of the importance of an athlete’s public image and met with a group of British journalists for an interview and an informal lunch in December in which she explained some of her goals for 2025. After hiring fitness trainer Yutaka Nakamura, who has worked with Grand Slam champions and world No. 1s Maria Sharapova and Naomi Osaka, Raducanu said: “I think I can become one of the best athletes in tennis. I think he’s really going to help with that.”
At that time, Raducanu had only just returned from a couple of months out after spraining foot ligaments at the start of September. She’d had a tricky period before that, too, opting against trying to qualify for the pre-U.S. Open hard-court swing and then arriving at the U.S. Open undercooked.
In her pre-tournament news conference, Raducanu spoke of how good she was feeling, but after losing to Sofia Kenin, Raducanu cried in her post-match duties. “I feel down, I feel sad,” she said.
Raducanu arrived in Melbourne under similar circumstances after a back spasm picked up while tying her shoelaces meant she arrived at the Australian Open with no match practice.
Both of her victories to date, against No. 26 seed Ekaterina Alexandrova and then former French Open semifinalist Amanda Anisimova, have been scrappy but clutch when necessary. She has won her last eight tiebreaks, including two against Alexandrova. Her tweaked serve has been shaky, but she has relied on her ground game and worked through physical issues to shield the problems with her serve. Raducanu received treatment on her back when 0-3 down in the second set against Anisimova, before winning seven of the next nine games to take the match.
Emma Raducanu has been impressive during her first two matches in Melbourne. (Shi Tang / Getty Images)
Her defensive tennis was outstanding against Anisimova, hustling across the baseline to draw errors by forcing one more shot out of an increasingly erratic opponent.
“I was able to get to some balls that maybe I wouldn’t have been able to previously,” Raducanu said afterwards.
When asked about their divergent paths over the past few years, Swiatek was philosophical. “Everybody’s story is different and everybody struggles with different stuff,” she said in a news conference on Thursday.
The expectation is that Swiatek will be too strong, but being in the position to take on the world’s best players feels like an important step for Raducanu.
“When we’re going to be out there on the court, whoever is going to play better will win, and that’s it,” Swiatek said.
(Top photo: Robert Prange / Getty Images)
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
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