knocked out another two-time major champion Coco Gauff,<\/a> beaten four Grand Slam champions in all, and surged into the top 30 of the WTA rankings, has showed every bit of what has generated all the buzz about Mboko. She is the latest in a string of Canadians from immigrant families who have made it to the top of the sport.<\/p>\n\u201cWe know Canada is a very multicultural country and we are very accepting of everyone,\u201d Andreescu, who has become a mentor to Mboko, said during an interview in Rome.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s a beautiful thing that we\u2019re all from different different cultures, different backgrounds, but at the end of the day Tennis Canada really has built this program in the acceptance of everybody, no matter who you are.\u201d<\/p>\n
The youngest by seven years of four tennis-playing siblings, Mboko has been winning more than just about anyone in professional women\u2019s tennis since the start of the year. She finished last year ranked 350th, with her coaches believing fully in her potential but also wanting her to take it slow, given her struggles with knee injuries in recent years.<\/p>\n
Now they have another problem on their hands. Mboko has won so many matches that she has already played more than she has ever played before. She started the year winning 22 in a row on the ITF World Tennis Tour, two rungs below the WTA Tour. She lost one, then won another five, this time at a WTA 125 event, the next rung up, in Porto. She has won matches in Rome, Ga. and Rome, Italy at the Italian Open. Her record on the year is 51-9. She is not a Cinderella story. She is just doing what she does \u2014 winning \u2014 on ever-bigger stages.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have been doing exactly the same thing I\u2019ve been doing every other day. I like to keep the same routine when I\u2019m in a tournament,\u201d she said after her win over Gauff, who had beaten her in three sets at the Italian Open.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I\u2019m a little bit superstitious in that way, in that sense, but I just like to keep everything super simple. I like to do the exact same thing every day in a tournament.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Tennis-Victoria-Mboko-Canadian-Open-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Fans at the Canadian Open have risen to their home hope. (Robert Prange \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a lot,\u201d Marko Strillic, one of three coaches she works with at the Canadian Tennis Federation, said during an interview at the Italian Open.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf she keeps winning, you have to figure out a way to manage the schedule so that she doesn\u2019t get hurt. This is for the long term.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was before Mboko cruised through French Open qualifying to earn her main draw debut, and then knocked through Sun as though she knew she would all along. Mboko was all business again against Lys, but for a couple of service breaks she quickly recovered from.<\/p>\n
Her brother Kevin, 27 and a tennis coach in suburban Toronto, said that from the moment she woke up, she set her mind on only one thing: winning.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe looked at us and said, \u2018I got to win today,\u2019\u201d he said in an interview after she did just that. \u201cWe were trying to bring her down a little bit, telling her that it\u2019s all right, to just go out there and have fun, enjoy the experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was like \u2018No, I got to win.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s how she was during her hit before walking onto the court, and it\u2019s how she was through the 79-minute match. Rain, wind, muddy balls, nothing really budged her off her game.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been really calm between the days,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s how my coach wanted it to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
She woke at a quarter to seven ahead of her match against Lys, ready to roll. There was quick breakfast, a ride to Roland Garros, a physical warm-up and then a 30-minute hit at 9:30 a.m.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen I just chilled in the locker room until my match,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
All week, all month, really, there has been a \u2018no big deal\u2019 sensibility to Mboko. She credited the presence of her sister and brother for that.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is so much happening even behind the scenes,\u201d she said. \u201cI feel like my family has been doing a good job of keeping me, I guess, isolated from it all. I have just been enjoying the moment. I have been enjoying time with my sister and my brother. I don\u2019t have so many people around me, and it\u2019s kept me very calm and very comfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n
At some point, this is going to get complicated, but for Kevin and everyone else closest to Mboko, this rocket ride both is and is not surprising.<\/p>\n
Her oldest sister Gracia, 28, who has been courtside all event, played tennis for the University of Denver. She said that she and her brothers always knew that their baby sister had something they did not. Gracia recalled a local women\u2019s tournament at their home club in Burlington, a city in the Greater Toronto area of Ontario, that she played in when she was 17.<\/p>\n
At the last minute, another slot opened up, and a pro at the club asked Victoria, who was just 9 and had come to watch, if she wanted to play. Victoria jumped at the opportunity and eventually faced her sister. Gracia won, 6-0, 6-0, but the way Victoria behaved, it was as though she had expected the results to go the other way.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s that belief in yourself that the very top of the one percent have,\u201d Gracia, a consultant in private equity, said Sunday after watching her sister win. \u201cIt\u2019s: \u2018not only should I win this match, I\u2019m going to go do it.\u2019 And then she does it.\u201d<\/p>\n
At least she does now. For the past couple of years, a knee injury caused by both rapid growth and a bad fall on a tennis court has made that difficult. She spent much of last year based in Belgium at the academy of Justine Henin, the former world No. 1 and four-time French Open champion. She played little for the first six months of the year. Getting healthy was the priority.<\/p>\n
Even then, she ended the year losing more than she won, dropping three of her last four matches.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast year ended very poorly,\u201d said Kevin. \u201cI didn\u2019t see any of this coming. No one did.\u201d<\/p>\n
Their father, Cyprien, a retired mechanical engineer who worked nights in part so that he could drive his children to their tennis obligations, was there too. Victoria\u2019s mother, God\u00e9e, an accountant, was back home, dealing with a heavy end-of-the-month workload, as was her other brother, David, a 25-year-old data scientist.<\/p>\n
The Mbokos moved from the Democratic Republic of Congo nearly three decades ago, to escape the First and Second Congo Wars of the mid-1990s. Visa issues kept the family separated, with God\u00e9e in Montreal and Cyprien in North Carolina. God\u00e9e then moved to N.C., where the family lived for several years and where Victoria was born, before all moving to Toronto when she was still a baby.<\/p>\n
Victoria didn\u2019t let the losses in the final months of 2024 get to her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just thought new year, new me,\u201d she said during an interview in Rome.<\/p>\n
She decided to play like the version of herself that she has long believed in: an aggressive, athletic player who likes to take control of points and dictate the action. In Miami, she beat Camila Osorio, a 23-year-old tour mainstay, and pushed Paula Badosa, the No. 10 seed at Roland-Garros, to a third-set tiebreak.<\/p>\n
Mboko has also showed off a precocious variety, mixing in drop shots and slices, including a hard, slicing forehand. Her coach is Nathalie Tauziat, who got to No. 3 in the world with a game molded around variety. But Mboko can also crack her serve at 120 mph. Not surprisingly, she grew up worshipping Serena Williams.<\/p>\n
In Rome, she cruised through the first set in her second-round match against\u00a0 Gauff, lacing backhands and forehands through the court on the Campo Centrale like a seasoned veteran. Gauff turned the match into one of her long-distance track races, getting so many balls back that Mboko was huffing and puffing between every point. But the world No. 2 came away seriously impressed. She \u201cfelt like playing myself,\u201d Gauff said in a huddle after the match, especially with how well Mboko covered the court.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the movement, I would say she\u2019s up there with me on that,\u201d Gauff, probably the best mover in the sport, said.<\/p>\n
Gracia Mboko said her sister came away from that loss both devastated and determined.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe told me she was so out of steam, that she couldn\u2019t believe how Coco was getting every ball back,\u201d she said Sunday.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe kept saying, \u2018I got to get in shape.\u2019 It motivated her.\u201d<\/p>\n
It certainly did. When she faced a double-fault-stricken version of Gauff in Montreal, she kept her foot on the accelerator after winning the first set 6-1. She knew that Gauff would raise her level, try to make her nervous, try to impose her experience on the match. Mboko didn\u2019t let her. She stayed even until 5-4, then broke Gauff to win the second set and the match.<\/p>\n
Against Elena Rybakina, in a semifinal that ebbed and flowed, she looked out of the contest at the end of the first and third sets. But she refused to give in, breaking Rybakina twice as she served for the match.<\/p>\n
And in the final, Osaka did a demolition job on her in the opener. Mboko just kept going, because she had learned plenty from that first loss to Gauff in Rome. She knew she had let the world No. 2\u2019s grit frustrate her, thinking about the last point when she was supposed to be thinking about the next one.<\/p>\n
Her coaches are onto this. So is she.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ll start to snap me right back into it,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019ll actually say: \u2018stay present, stay focused, or close it right here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
With 51 wins on the year, Mboko isn\u2019t exactly unfamiliar with closing it. Now she is doing it on the biggest stage in the sport.<\/p>\n
(Top photo: David Kirouac \/\u00a0 Imagn Images)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s note: This story has been updated during Victoria Mboko\u2019s run to the WTA 1,000 Canadian Open title…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62337,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-67419","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67419\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}