THE teen revolution is here and the myth of invincibility shattered.
Those twin spectacles punctuated the just-ended US Open tennis championship at the city that never sleeps: New York.
In a historic weekend marking the end of the Grand Slam season, Filipino-Canadian Leylah Fernandez and Briton Emma Raducanu battled for the women’s crown that ushered in the advent of teenagers taking over the grandest stage in tennis.
Fernandez turned 19 just days after action started at Flushing Meadows, while Raducanu was 18 when she started her stunning run of US Open victories, starting with her three-match winning streak in the qualifiers to get to the main draw of the fourth and final major of the season.
Never mind that Raducanu defeated Fernandez in their title clash to complete a 10-match sweep without dropping a single set in her 20-set run.
Before yielding a 6-4, 6-3 defeat to Raducanu, Fernandez, whose Canada-born mother is a Filipina, had already made her mark in her amazing march to the finals, defeating a pair of three-time Slam champions in German Angelique Kerber (2016 US Open winner) and, most notably, Japan’s Naomi Osaka. Osaka, the world’s highest paid female athlete today, was the defending titlist deprived by Fernandez from capturing her third US Open crown since 2018.
The Raducanu-Fernandez showdown was the first all-teen US Open finals since Serena Williams, then 17, beat Martina Hingis, 18, in the 1999 edition.
Expect more upheavals from the pair from hereon. The way they played and conducted themselves during their fairytale journey spoke volumes of their maturity beyond their age.
And how about Daniil Medvedev’s conquest of Novak Djokovic?
To say it was the shocker of the year would also be like saying, truly, that Yordenis Ugás’s win over Manny Pacquiao last month was the upset of the year.
Like Pacquiao, Djokovic wasn’t also supposed to lose—and in astonishing straight sets at that, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4.
In marching to the finals, Djokovic has compiled 27 straight wins on his way to sweeping the year’s first three majors in the Australian and French Opens, and Wimbledon.
And against Medvedev, the 25-year-old, 6-foot-6 Russian, Djokovic, 34, held a 5-3 head-to-head duel.
The wise-money bet all went to Djokovic, who, with a victory, would have made him the winningest Slam winner in history with 21 majors—one up on Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, both absent on injuries.
And Djokovic took a bizarre beating, Medvedev cruelly reducing him into a non-entity in an unbelievable display of tennis wizardry that incredibly made him look like Moses parting the Red Sea.
So devastated was Djokovic that, seemingly realizing defeat was imminent, he cried unabashedly in one changeover break in the second set.
With Medvedev becoming suddenly a tsunami of catastrophic proportions—16-6 margin in aces, 38-27 edge in winners—Djokovic is invincible no more. Amid this backdrop, even the greatest crumble.
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