Once a breath of fresh air, now a curiosity: can Raducanu find a solution?

The kneejerk response to Emma Raducanu is always to offer solutions. Either she offers them, or the rest of us do. Oh yes, we’ve got plenty of them. Or social media chimes in with something helpful like: “Well, that’s karma for the way you treated Sir Andy.”
Raducanu has been spending three years searching for solutions and her first-round defeat at the US Open was further proof that the latest didn’t work either. I had actually liked her approach: I’m going to do it differently from everyone else, I’m going to do it my way. Well, I did like it, until it was proved to be so utterly flawed.
So she will go back to the drawing board again now, at least that is what she said at Flushing Meadows on Tuesday night. She has already spent a lot of time at that drawing board, so much that the attempts to recreate the carefree psychology that swept her to the famous fairytale of New York three years ago are busted. She can’t be that person again. Too much has happened. So she needs another solution.
Right now everyone is saying that the solution is to play more of the smaller tournaments before the big ones. And, come on, Emma, that’s obvious, Emma, isn’t it? But it can’t have been obvious when the very reason she stopped playing so much was because she had felt that that wasn’t working. Yet somehow we’ve suddenly decided that this grade-A student is some kind of high-performance wally. This is the latest burden that she has accumulated.
Back in those early Raducanu days, I too had my own solution: stop accumulating all those endorsements. I was furious with IMG for making themselves rich — sorry, making her rich — so quickly.
Don’t sate the ambition. Don’t dull the hunger. Don’t change her life too fast. These are all very basic junior-grade lessons in athlete management, yet they decided to ignore them all, and champagne all round.
• Emma Raducanu reduced to tears after US Open first-round defeat
Yet I don’t know if I’m right. I can’t. I can’t know what might have happened if she had taken the other route. I don’t know if retaining a more normal life would have helped her to beat Sofia Kenin. Neither can I tell if the plus of making £10million a year cancels out the minus of a first-round exit.
I sometimes wonder for how long Raducanu, 21, will even carry on playing. The women’s tour is notoriously tough (see Ash Barty, Marian Bartoli, Naomi Osaka) and Raducanu is already made for life. At what point is she playing on more because of Evian and Tiffany and Dior and Porsche and all the others (sorry, IMG, if I failed to give brand mentions to them all) and the rewards they are heaping on her than because of the rewards of the tennis itself. Does she even know herself?
I wonder too if she has an awareness of the way her profile has changed. Three years ago she was the freshest breath of fresh air, a thing of wonder and of joy. And now she is a curiosity, the athlete who is not as good as we hoped she was, and the fact is that when you are as beautiful and marketable an athlete as she, then this story of the athlete who cannot find the right solutions runs almost as big in the media as the one who can.
That is a tough thing to carry. I don’t know how heavy that burden is, because she manages to keep her life and her real emotional spectrum so well protected. Nevertheless, there will be people who read this and will feel there is no sympathy to be extended to a young lady who made so much cash so fast.
All I really know is that after being beaten by Kenin, she said: “I feel down” and “I feel sad”, and it is a tough soul that could not sympathise.
It has become her lot to be a world-famous tennis player who trots the globe and is famous for the matches that she doesn’t win. We see her every error and her every defeat and we feast on it and we pick it apart, and then she fronts up and is obliged to answer questions about it, and afterwards the analysis starts all over again — at which point, of course, we reach for solutions and return to telling her what she is doing wrong and how she can put it right.
All of which would make anyone feel a bit down and a bit sad. I hope there is a solution, but I’m just not sure that there is any more.