Emma Raducanu will miss national team duty again next month after Great Britain confirmed their four-woman line-up for the Billie Jean King Cup clash with Sweden – and it could jeopardise her Olympic dream.
The 2021 US Open champion is still recovering from triple surgery on a set of injuries that have kept her out since April, and intends to return to court at a Chinese exhibition event in December.
There was a slim hope that she might see the Copper Box Arena in London as a supportive venue for her comeback match but 11 November has just come too early in her rehabilitation.
Instead, Katie Boulter, Harriet Dart, Jodie Burrage and Heather Watson will take on Sweden, with victory required to give Britain any chance of reaching next year’s Billie Jean King Cup Finals.
Even to do so, they would still have to win another tie in April next year, one that will also represent Raducanu’s last chance to represent her country in this Olympic cycle.
The 20-year-old has only played for Great Britain once in her senior career, Easter 2022 against Czechia. She missed the Finals last year in Glasgow with the beginning of the wrist injury that has blighted her ever since, and was unavailable for the clash with France earlier this year.
Raducanu said she “would love to play the Olympics”, where the tennis will be held at Roland Garros next summer, but qualification is now not straightforward.
By International Tennis Federation (ITF) rules, a player is only eligible if they have been part of a Billie Jean King Cup team at least twice in the four-year cycle leading up to the tournament. Raducanu has only done so once, and will only have one more opportunity to do so, in April next year.
If she does not make that, she could appeal to the ITF Olympic Committee for a discretionary exemption based on injury. She will probably have at least one friendly voice on that committee in the shape of Sandi Procter, the LTA’s president, but there are 13 other voting members of that committee who will need convincing of Raducanu’s commitment to ITF competition. She will not be helped in that regard by her comments in Indian Wells, when she told reporters she didn’t even know when GB’s next tie was. It was just a month away and she did not play.
But that was before the surgery. Raducanu’s wrist problems, often veiled from the public in an effort to limit any tactical advantage to her opponents, were causing her pain every day and it’s easy to see why she would shun the idea of adding more load to her schedule.
The Olympics next summer though represents a huge opportunity. Since the golden summer of 2021, Raducanu has endured the other side of the double-edged sword that is the bosom of the British public. Injuries and expectations have worn her down. “I’ve been very high and very low,” she told The Times in June.
She would do well to remember the highs. Her run to the fourth round of Wimbledon was a national event, drawing huge TV audiences and catapulting her into viewers’ affections. After her stress-related retirement against Ajla Tomljanovic, she appeared on BBC TV to talk about her defeat wearing an England shirt: it was an inspired piece of PR, probably the most successful of her short career so far. It tied her success and image to the tidal wave of excitement following the England football team, so that when she won the US Open, a slam that sometimes goes under the radar on pay TV and mostly in the small hours, everyone was ready to celebrate.
Much water has passed under the river since, but Raducanu can recreate that heady cocktail of patriotism and sporting success at the Olympic Games, a two-week period where people who never usually care about fencing, swimming, skeet shooting or indeed tennis, suddenly become the biggest fans in the world.
There is the opportunity to perform on the biggest stage too – no one is suggesting Raducanu is about to win gold on what is probably her weakest surface, but were she to string together some victories she would not be the first player to something more than the sum of its parts away from doing well in a tournament without points or prize money.
And then there is the brand opportunity. Some might not like to talk about it, but the Olympics is a stage like no other a chance to get involved with one of the biggest advertising spaces in the world. Raducanu has never shied away from that side of the game – and why should she – and the Games is another chance to strengthen her brand.
Of course, there is no guarantee Raducanu will even be able to recover her ranking enough to qualify, and the protected ranking regulations for the Games are not the same as the tour. She will have to earn enough points to get comfortably back inside the top 100 by the end of the French Open.
And the Games falls at an awkward time of year, on clay courts not long after Wimbledon and just before the hard-court season. But these are just details. If at all she can, Raducanu should look to be there. But the window for getting in has just narrowed a little more.
