 "Victoria Mboko celebrates winning WTA Montreal crown, standing next to runner-up Naomi Osaka. Image: Reuters")
Victoria Mboko stunned the tennis world on Thursday as she defeated four-time Grand Slam winner Naomi Osaka to clinch the National Bank Open title (Canadian Open). In her first WTA final, the 18-year-old Canadian teenager, who was wild card entry into the tournament, defeated Osaka 2-6, 6-4, 6-1 in the final.
Mboko is the third wild card to win a WTA 1000 title event, following Maria Sharapova at Cincinnati in 2011 and Bianca Andreescu at Indian Wells in 2019. She is also the only Canadian to win the home event in the Open Era after Faye Urban in 1969 and Bianca Andreescu in 2019.
Mboko joins exclusive list with Canadian Open title win
Before an ecstatic center-court crowd of 11,000 at IGA Stadium in Montreal, she converted eight of her nine break points, seizing her fourth win of the week over a Grand Slam winner. Mboko, who was ranked outside the top 300 to start the season and had climbed to 85th entering the week, is now projected to rise to 34th in the world.
“It feels unbelievable right now,” Mboko said, adding that “words cannot really describe how the day went.”
After falling hard early Wednesday in the third set in the semi-finals against Elena Rybakina, Mboko woke up Thursday morning and rushed to the hospital for X-rays and an MRI, but ultimately received the green light to play.
“Today was such an eventful day, actually,” said Mboko, who often shook her wrist in visible discomfort. “It feels unbelievable right now. I mean, words cannot really describe how today went.
“There’s some moments where it was aggravating me a lot, but I feel like it was the final. I just kept saying to myself, ‘You have one more to go.’”
Besides Osaka and Rybakina, Mboko defeated Grand Slam winners Sofia Kenin and Coco Gauff on her way to the final. This makes her the second youngest woman to beat four Grand Slam winners in a single tournament after Serena Williams (17y 11m) at the US Open in 1999.
Youngest women to beat four Grand Slam winners in a tournament (Open Era)
17 years 338 days – Serena Williams
18 years 335 days – Victoria Mboko
19 years 2 days – Tracy Austin
Osaka, the four-time Grand Slam champion who reached No. 1 in the world, had her best performance in a WTA 1000 tournament since also reaching the Miami final in 2022. She stepped away for 15 months toward the end of that season and had daughter Shai in July 2023. She’s winless since the 2021 Australian Open.
With agency inputs