Next Gen Athletes

Victoria Mboko’s World Tour: How One Canadian Teenager Is Quietly Redrawing the Map of Soft Power By Our Jaded Correspondent on the Periphery of Relevance PARIS—While most 18-year-olds are perfecting the art of ghosting recruiters and pretending to read Sartre, Victoria Mboko has been busy issuing geopolitical IOUs. The Canadian tennis prodigy—currently ranked somewhere between…

From the vantage point of an airport lounge in Dubai—where the Wi-Fi is sponsored by an oil-rich emirate and the cappuccino costs more than a day’s wage in half the planet—Brandon Nakashima’s rise looks less like an American coming-of-age tale and more like an accidental referendum on what the world actually values: controlled aggression wrapped…