By Giri Nathan
I’ve always loved the semifinals day of a Slam, when the unwieldy cast of characters has thinned out to something more narratively manageable, and all the four are bringing their own flavor to the mix. I enjoyed the quartet at Wimbledon on Thursday. Ons Jabeur, last year’s Wimbledon runner-up, has unfinished business here, and she’s been exacting revenge with every stylish swipe of her racquet. Her opponent was Aryna Sabalenka, the best player of the season, now crushing it across all surfaces. On the other side of the bracket there was Elina Svitolina, unseeded, nine months removed from childbirth and already going deep in Slams again, proving that her Roland-Garros quarterfinal run was no fluke. And her opponent was...let’s see...Marketa Vondrousova? Who has, in addition to conspicuously Brooklyn-looking tattoos, a career losing record on grass? It was an unexpected name to see at this stage of the tournament, but Vondrousova, the betting favorite, won that match to become the first unseeded woman to play the Wimbledon final in the Open Era. Most fans could use a refresher on her game.
Given her résumé as a former world No. 14, and now two-time major finalist, the 24-year-old Vondrousova is relatively low-profile. Chalk this up to her extremely inconsistent results, but chalk those up to the injuries that have kept her off the tour for huge chunks of time in between her triumphs. A former No. 1-ranked junior, Vondrousova won her first tour-level match at age 16. She won her first (and so far only) tour title at age 17, made the final at Roland-Garros at age 19, won the silver medal at the 2021 Olympics, and has just advanced to the Wimbledon final. In the midst of all that, she has also endured three major injury layoffs—two of them wrist surgeries—each of which lasted half a year. So it’s been a career of starts and stops, of broken momentum. Even her current unseeded status at Wimbledon is a little misleading, more a product of her prolonged absence last year than a reflection of her excellent 30–10 record thus far this year. The raw talent’s always been there.