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.
That said, very little has gone right for Vondrousova on grass in her life. She had a 4–11 career record on the surface heading into this tournament; winning the championship would finally put her at .500. “For me, when it was clay or hard, maybe I would say yeah, maybe it’s possible. But grass was impossible for me. It’s even crazier that this is happening,” she said of a path to the final that passed through four seeded players. On paper, it is an unlikely fit. Vondrousova is no dominant server or big hitter, but a return specialist with soft hands and a pristine drop shot, who consistently sits among tour leaders in percentage of return points won. Her estimation of her own chances on grass might be reflected in her husband’s absence from the semifinal; he was back at home working and watching their sphynx cat. But Vondrousova eliminated Elina Svitolina, 6–3, 6–3, with some supreme defensive play, and I can only imagine the cat soon booked its flight to London.
Despite entering the final as the underdog against lawn sorceress Ons Jabeur, Vondrousova can find some solace in their recent head-to-head. She has won both of their meetings this year, one in the Australian Open, and the other at Indian Wells, though these matches bookended a procedure that Jabeur had done on her knee in February. This present version of Jabeur is superior to those versions, and it will be a fresh test for this Czech lefty who is so new to grass excellence. All that can be said for sure, of a match between these two: lots and lots of drop shots. Get ready to run.
