In her meteoric rise, Canada’s Victoria Mboko is playing beyond her years

In tennis, it’s not when you’re behind that you get worried; it’s when you’re ahead. Many players tense up and start flubbing shots when they are on the brink of winning, especially if they are young and inexperienced.

Victoria Mboko is certainly young: just 19 years old. She is certainly inexperienced: This is her first time in the main draw of the famed Australian Open.

So Mboko might easily have succumbed to the yips when she was trying to close out the first set of her second-round match on Wednesday against a seasoned opponent. Caty McNally is 24 and competed in the Open for the first time way back in 2020, when Mboko was 13. She is a lean, 5-foot-11 American with a hard forehand that skims just over the net and seldom misses.

The score was five games to four. McNally was serving. The Canadian from Toronto needed just one point to go up one set to none.

McNally sent shot after shot over the net: forehands, backhands, a tricky slice. Mboko sent each sailing back, some of them hit flat and hard, others high and looping, landing just short of the baseline.

After 24 shots, the longest rally of the match, McNally dumped a ball into the mesh. Mboko raised a closed fist above her head. Not a yip in sight.

To call it vintage Mboko would be wrong. The wine is too new. But it was the kind of performance fans have come to expect since she became a tennis sensation just a few short months ago.

Canada has seen some rocketing debuts in women’s tennis over the years, like those of Eugenie Bouchard, Bianca Andreescu and Leylah Fernandez. Mboko’s may be the most thrilling.

In November, 2024, she was 350th in the world. Today, 14 months later, she is seeded 17th in Melbourne, home of the Australian Open. That makes her the leading Canadian woman, just ahead of Fernandez, who is out of the competition after losing in the first round on Tuesday.

Mboko took two matches last spring at the French Open, her first wins in a Grand Slam tournament since graduating from junior status. But the win that put her on the map came at home in Canada. She enchanted the country last summer when she worked her way through four Grand Slam champions to win the National Bank Open in Montreal. Suddenly her name and face were everywhere.

She followed up by winning a second title in Hong Kong in November and reaching the final of a tournament in Adelaide, Australia, earlier this month. To move from 350th to 17th in the course of a year or so, “that is incredibly fast, and that doesn’t happen very often,” says Noëlle van Lottum, head of women’s tennis at Tennis Canada, who has helped guide Mboko’s career.

She cautions that tennis is a game of ups and downs and Mboko still has a lot of matches to play and a lot to learn. To compete at this elite level over the long term, she must grow even stronger, work on the weaknesses that her rivals are learning to exploit and navigate the physical and mental challenges of becoming a sudden star.

In the euphoria of the moment, it is worth remembering that she has yet to come close to the achievements of Bouchard, Andreescu and Fernandez, each of whom reached (and in Andreescu’s case – at the U.S. Open in 2019 – won) a Grand Slam final.

But van Lottum says the dreams Mboko has – world No. 1, a Grand Slam victory – are well within her grasp. Apart from being an amazing athlete with a “natural power” that recalls that of her childhood hero Serena Williams, she is a grounded, laid-back young woman in a high-strung sport.

Mboko’s parents, who moved from the Democratic Republic of Congo to the United States then Canada, where Mboko was raised, have been a key to her rise.

My father and Victoria Mboko: A decade-long tennis dream comes true

Mboko says that her father, an engineer, used to drive her around to events and practices, working night shifts so he would be free to help her during the day. “My mom and dad always told me that, ‘You can do it, you can play at any level,’” she said in an interview after winning a doubles match on Tuesday.

Her older sister and two older brothers helped, too. They preceded her in athletics and, as the youngest, she wanted to catch up. She played tennis against her sister when she was eight and her sister was 18. Naturally, her sister won. Mboko didn’t like it. She decided to get better.

Mboko doesn’t want to overthink her recent success, but she says she has learned that “tricking your mind to being more confident with yourself can really go a long way – just putting trust in yourself; you know, you’re here for a reason.”

That trust was on clear display in the second set of her match against McNally. The American fought back and went ahead three games to none. It looked as if the contest might go to a third and deciding set. Mboko showed her frustration. After missing a return, she arched her back and opened her mouth as if to say, “Get a grip, Vicky.”

Then she steadied. In another long rally, she sent ripping shots into one corner then another until McNally was dashing from side to side just to keep up.

After delivering a hard serve that was too much for McNally to handle, she shouted “come on!” – the universal rallying cry of tennis. After hitting a deep winner that again eluded her opponent, she shook her racket in the air in triumph. It didn’t hurt, she later said, that there were dozens of Canadians in the crowd, waving red-and-white flags and cheering her on.

A few nervous misses by McNally, who had six double faults on her serve for the day, compared with Mboko’s two, brought matters to a head. Mboko found herself serving for the match. She missed one match point, sending a shot way wide, but then hit a blistering serve that McNally could not touch – an ace, her first of the day on the last point of the day; a perfect way to finish.

Her fans leapt to their feet. Mboko beamed. After patiently posing for many selfies and signing many giant tennis balls, she waved and left the court: a winner again.

On Thursday she meets Clara Tauson of Denmark, who is at about the same level in the rankings as she is. “I know she’s very aggressive,” Mboko told the media. “She’s a hard hitter, and I’m really looking forward to it. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.”