The Telegraph
‘I was young and my ego way too big’ – Victoria Azarenka reaping benefits of age and wisdom in second coming
What a reinvention we are witnessing from Victoria Azarenka, the woman who has entered a wormhole in the space-time continuum and travelled back seven years to when she was world No 1. After outlasting Serena Williams in Thursday night’s semi-final, Azarenka is now on a winning streak of 12 straight matches. She has even eclipsed her fellow finalist Naomi Osaka as the most compelling storyline of the tournament. Both women carry a meaningful symbolism. Osaka has highlighted police brutality in the USA by wearing the name of a different black victim on her face mask, every time she walks out on court. Azarenka, meanwhile, has become the personification of the “working mothers” narrative that has come to dominate this tournament. Whisper it, but when she was such a dominant hard-court force in 2012 and 2013, Azarenka was not such an easy player to root for. She was prickly and defiant – and wound crowds up with the weird ululation that she emitted every time she struck the ball. At the 2013 Australian Open, Azarenka claimed to have rushed off court because of a “locked rib”, whereas everyone else thought she had suffered a panic attack as she tried to serve out her semi-final win over Sloane Stephens. If her relentless baseline game made her the nearest female analogue to Novak Djokovic, so too did her hard-to-quantify personality. There is nothing wrong with a few rough edges, especially when your day job involves firing projectiles at your opponent. But Azarenka herself acknowledges that she has mellowed with age – and with parenthood too. Her son Alexander was born in 2016, whereupon she became mired in a custody dispute that postponed her comeback significantly. Having fought back to beat Williams in three sets on Thursday night, Azarenka was asked what she remembered about their last-but-one meeting on Arthur Ashe Stadium, when she had served for the title. “I was young,” she replied. “My ego was way too big. So now it’s a little smaller and the results are coming.”
