The World According to Kamilla Rakhimova, or How to Be 22 and Already a Geopolitical Pawn By Our Correspondent in Everywhere and Nowhere PARIS—In the grand casino that is the WTA Tour, Kamilla Rakhimova has quietly become the house’s favorite underdog: a 22-year-old Kazakh with a baseline game as steady as a Swiss bank clerk…
Lucia Bronzetti and the Beautiful Futility of Chasing Yellow Balls By our man in the cheap seats, Rome–Madrid–Melbourne circuit The planet is busy immolating itself—Arctic on clearance, democracies running end-of-season sales—yet for two hours on a Thursday afternoon in Rome, 3,000 otherwise sane Italians squeezed into Campo Centrale to watch 23-year-old Lucia Bronzetti swipe a…
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…
Ekaterina Alexandrova and the Fine Art of Being Russian While Winning By the time Ekaterina Alexandrova cracked the Top 20 last season, the Kremlin had already annexed a chunk of Ukraine, Wimbledon had politely asked Russian players to compete as neutrals, and several European governments were debating whether a tennis ball could be considered a…
