Suzan Lamens: The Dutch Tennis Underdog Quietly Redrawing Global Power Lines—One Backhand at a Time
Suzan Lamens and the Quiet Art of Winning When Nobody’s Watching
By Our Man in Rotterdam, still waiting for the coffee to kick in
ROTTERDAM—In a planet currently transfixed by cease-fires that aren’t, elections that refuse to concede, and social-media CEOs who treat geopolitics like a particularly spicy meme, the name Suzan Lamens has been sneaking onto scoreboards the way a pickpocket sidles through a metro turnstile. You probably missed it. Most people do. The Dutch No. 116—yes, that’s her WTA ranking, not the length of the queue at Schiphol passport control—has been compiling wins in modest arenas from Wiesbaden to Târgu Mureș, places whose vowel-to-consonant ratio alone could trigger a diplomatic incident.
Yet Lamens matters. Not in the bombastic, flag-draped sense that makes governments commission parades, but in the subtler currency of modern existence: proof that persistence can still outrun hype, at least until the hype notices and devours it whole. While billionaires orbit Earth for ten-minute ego excursions and nations argue over whether climate change is merely “inconvenient,” a 25-year-old from Groningen keeps stringing together three-setters on red clay laid over recycled tennis graves. Somewhere in that ritual—ball meets string meets baseline meets line judge who definitely needs new glasses—lies a quiet rebuttal to the idea that everything must be loud to be relevant.
Global implications? Start with the Balkans. Last month in Zagreb, Lamens toppled a Serbian prodigy whose Instagram following exceeds the population of Ljubljana. The match drew 347 spectators, three dogs, and one very confused tourist who thought he’d bought tickets to a water-polo match. Still, the result ping-ponged across regional sports sites within minutes, briefly uniting Croat and Serb comment sections in the shared conviction that “the Dutch girl has a killer backhand.” If soft power can be generated by a 97-mph cross-court winner, consider this shuttle diplomacy in sneakers.
Zoom out farther. China’s tennis apparatus, still reeling from the Peng Shuai saga, monitors every female player ranked between 100 and 200 with the obsessive attention usually reserved for Uyghur poetry slams. Should Lamens crack the top 100, she’ll enter that Orwellian spreadsheet, her forehand scrutinized frame-by-frame by coaches who’ve already reverse-engineered spaghetti westerns. One more argument for keeping your footwork tidy: you never know whose AI is watching.
Western Europe, meanwhile, treats her rise as a charming subplot in the larger Netflix docudrama titled “We Still Exist, Honestly.” With Brexit turning the English Channel into a moat and France cycling through presidents like disposable lighters, the EU could use a feel-good tale that doesn’t involve subsidies. Enter Suzan, whose prize money this season (€68,432, or three minutes of Elon Musk’s tax refund) is already being touted by Dutch pundits as “proof that investing in sport pays off.” Translation: if she cracks the top 50, the Ministry of Health & Sports will slap her face on a billboard above the A10, right next to the reminder to eat more kale.
Of course, the shadow economy of women’s tennis has its own ironies. The same tour that fines players for taking too long between points happily schedules matches at 11:17 p.m. on outer courts lit by a single floodlight powered, apparently, by a hamster wheel. Lamens navigates this carnival with the deadpan efficiency of a bike courier in Utrecht traffic: she knows the potholes, she knows the shortcuts, she keeps her earbuds in. When asked by a local reporter what she’d do with a Grand Slam trophy, she answered, “Probably use it as a vase. My mother likes tulips.” Somewhere, a branding executive weeps into his influencer spreadsheet.
The broader significance? In an era when attention is the last non-fungible token, Lamens is a walking experiment in anti-virality. She wins matches, not arguments; she collects ranking points, not followers. And yet, like a slow leak in the hull of the SS Spectacle, her results seep into the consciousness of anyone still bothering to scroll past the outrage. One day, if the planets align and the draw gods smile, she could face Swiatek on Court Suzanne Lenglen—irony noted—and the world will suddenly discover what a few hundred die-hards already know: the quiet ones hit harder.
Until then, she’ll keep boarding budget flights to places most people can’t spell, trading groundstrokes with teenagers who grew up on Fortnite and gluten-free optimism. And every now and then, when the wind off the North Sea smells vaguely of French fries and existential dread, a small corner of the globe exhales and mutters: “Lamens won again. Imagine that.”
Imagine indeed. In a universe addicted to spectacle, the most radical act might just be showing up, staying sane, and refusing to trend.
