EMMA RADUCANU has struggled since her famous US Open triumph last year, and heads into Wimbledon with injury fears.
Emma Raducanu’s agent, Max Eisenbud, has insisted the teenager’s growing list of sponsorship deals is not having a negative effect on her on-court performances, as he explained why she has struggled to find her form recently.
Raducanu burst onto the scene last year when she reached the fourth round at Wimbledon as a wildcard. She then followed that up by creating history with her US Open success, becoming the first ever qualifier to win a Grand Slam singles title.
In the process, she also became the first British woman to win a Grand Slam singles title since Virginia Wade’s 1977 Wimbledon win. The victory catapulted Raducanu into superstardom and sparked huge interest in her from sponsors.
The 19-year-old has worked with the likes of Nike, Tiffany and Porsche and recently announced a new partnership with HSBC. On the court, however, she has struggled since her US Open victory.
In an appearance on the BBC’s ‘The Sports Desk’ podcast, Eisenbud said: “We could have done 50 days of shoots. I’ve never seen the amount of excitement and companies that wanted to be in business with Emma after the US Open.
“It’s been a tough year. I think she got a lot of bad luck and what really hurt her was [catching] Covid and not having a great off-season, and then she was playing catch up.
“But I think that if she had zero shoot dates, everything would be the same. I know from the outside, you guys want to look at all those things – but if she locked herself in the room for the whole year and didn’t do anything, I think it would be the same.”
Speaking in March, Raducanu said: “Maybe you just see, on the news or on social media, me signing this or that deal and I feel like it’s quite misleading because I’m doing five, six hours a day [of training], I’m at the club for 12 hours a day. But I throw out one post in the car on the way to practice and all of a sudden it’s ‘I don’t focus on tennis’.
“I think that it is unfair but it’s something I have learned to deal with and become a bit more insensitive to the outside noise. At the end of the day, I feel like my days [with sponsors] are pretty limited. I’m not doing crazy days. I’m doing three, four days every quarter, so it’s really not that much.”
