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After six months away, 2019 US Open champion Bianca Andreescu has begun another comeback.
There have been too many of those in her star-crossed career. And each time, she’s returned to a different, evolving – improving – WTA Tour, with a little more scar tissue than she had the previous time.
But there have been enough moments of “vintage” Andreescu so far that she should be encouraged, not discouraged, about the challenging road that lies ahead.
On Friday night, on the main stadium court in Madrid, Andreescu faced 2022 Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina, who has had plenty of challenges of her own.
But they have plenty in common. Everything Andreescu does will be judged on the incredible form she showed at several tournaments in 2019, including that triumph at the US Open at age 19. And everything Rybakina does now is also compared to her very best.
Emma Raducanu can relate. So can Naomi Osaka.
The final result Friday was a 6-3, 6-2 Rybakina win that took an hour and 17 minutes and, once Rybakina had found her bearings in her first match in nearly a year on the red clay, was fairly routine.
The main thing, though, is that she’s back. And she looks healthy.
Not the friendliest draw
It wasn’t a shock, in the sense that the two had played twice before, and Rybakina had won in straight sets both times: in the first round of Dubai in 2023, and in the second round of Wimbledon in 2022.
And Rybakina is emblematic of the 2025 version of the WTA Tour that Andreescu now competes against. Her power is prodigious, and her serve is a major weapon. And those two elements mean it’s an even bigger challenge for Andreescu to get on top of points enough that she can impose the variety in her game that brought her so much acclaim, and some big trophies, six years ago.
The Canadian, who turns 25 in June, urged herself on from the beginning. But with the ball flying everywhere for Rybakina in the first few games in her first clay-court match in nearly a year, she needed to stake a claim.
She couldn’t.
And not only did Rybakina eventually find her range, she stabilized things enough that she could also handle the slices and moonballs that Andreescu was directing her way.
Except most of those weren’t by choice; they were a by-product of the Canadian simply having trouble catching up with the power. She was pulled out wide on both sides. And she couldn’t find the right return position to attack second serves that bounced high above her shoulders.
By the end, she went for full-out aggression and took the net, trying to put pressure. It was effective, if too late. But that, too, is not the way Andreescu would prefer to play, if she were in control.
First-round match vs Kessler impressive
In the first round in Madrid, Andreescu played full balls-to-the-wall power baseline tennis against American McCartney Kessler. And it was spectacular.
Kessler, who is nearly a year older than Andreescu, had no ranking at all when Andreescu won the US Open and had never broken the top 700. Indeed, she reappeared a few weeks later – at No. 1207. She was a sophomore at the University of Florida that year with ambitions to become a physician’s assistant after she tried the pro tour. Kessler is one of many players who have appeared in recent years, while Andreescu has often been out of commission, and broken into the top 50 – or higher.
But Kessler came having only played three matches in her career on the spring clay-court swing. She lost first round at the WTA 250 in Rouen last week to Fiona Ferro.
(Andreescu made her return at that Rouen tournament, losing in a third-set tiebreak to the serviceable but relatively benign Suzan Lamens. Lamens, three days older than Kessler and also a year older than Andreescu, broke into the top 100 for the first time only last October. Andreescu had her chances).
The win over Kessler, naturally, gave Andreescu’s fans hope. She really looked good: fit, confident, in control.
The Rybakina match was sort of a jolt of reality.
Putting the ego aside
In quotes published by Radio-Canada earlier this week, Andreescu said she didn’t think she’d played that well against Lamens during the match. But looking at the video afterwards, she realized that it was better than she thought, that she’d put up a good fight.
Those quotes came from tennis journalist Carole Bouchard, who spoke to her before Madrid more extensively for her Substack.
She said that 2019 was sort of the “ignorance is bliss” era. Now, not only does she have maybe too much awareness of the stakes, she’s also conscious that her window is a lot smaller than it was.
“Just not taking being on Tour for granted. That’s one of my biggest lessons, … For instance, (in Madrid) you have like a top 16 locker room and players’ area. I had that in 2022 and obviously at the beginning of my career, but in a way I thought that was normal. So now it’s like I’m getting the other side, and I’m not saying it’s bad or anything, but you don’t get the same perks, obviously. So that’s also a very humbling experience for sure,” she told Bouchard. “But that was my normal and I thought that it was just going to be like that my whole career. So I think one big lesson for me.”
A WTA 125 ahead next week
The good news is that Andreescu, who will also play Rome, isn’t waiting another 10 days for that to happen.
She’s headed to the Catalonia Open, a WTA 125-level tournament that had previous homes in Reus and Lleida before moving to the Vic Tennis Club this year.
It has been a LONG time since Andreescu played below the WTA level: more than six years.
The last time was in January, 2019, when she had just broken into the top 100 after qualfying and winning a round at the Australian Open. Andreescu stopped in Newport Beach, Calif. on the way home to play a high-level “Challenger” type event that was part of the now-defunct Oracle Series.
She trounced No. 3 seed Eugenie Bouchard in the quarters, edged past No. 2 seed Tatjana Maria in a third-set tiebreak in the semis, and beat No. 7 seed Jessica Pegula 6-0, 4-6, 6-2 in the final to jump into the top 70. And by that very fact, she earned herself a wild card at Indian Wells a month later.
The BNP Paribas Open has made a practice of offering wild cards to rising players who would make the cut on their current ranking, but were out of range at the tournament entry deadline that was (then) six weeks prior.
And we know what happened there.
No coach, at least for now
The commentators on Andreescu’s matches this week referred to her new coach, the veteran German Torben Beltz.
Except … that isn’t actually happening. (The first clue that should have come to their attention was the fact that he wasn’t in the player box either in Rouen, or Madrid).
Beltz, who coached Angelique Kerber during half-a-dozen stints during her career, is the recently-named head of women’s tennis for the German Tennis Federation.
That’s a pretty steady, stress-free gig, and probably well-remunerated as well.
We’re told Beltz did spend a couple of weeks with Andreescu training in Europe, as she readied for her return. But only on an informal basis.
At least for now, she is travelling with Antonio Fernandez Cantisano, a Spaniard she has worked with before and who is sort of one-stop shopping: coach, hitting partner and physio all in one.
Andreescu hasn’t had a full-time coach since the experienced Sven Groeneveld took his leave at the end of 2022.
During her last stint, she had hitting partner J.T. Nishimura as a hitting partner/coach.
After Vic, Andrescu heads to Rome, where she’ll play the main draw once again on a protected ranking.
The unexpected appendectomy that required the first surgery of her life, which occurred in February as she prepared to make her return at Indian Wells and Miami and cost her another six weeks, did allow her to reclaim that protected ranking. At No. 64, it will get her into the extended 96-player 1000 draws.
After that, she would have to play the qualifying at Roland Garros at this point, having used up her allowed “protected ranking Grand Slams” quota of two during her previous absence.
The French Federation isn’t big on giving main draw wild cards to non-French players. Perhaps Tennis Canada can negotiate something for her, as they have done in past years for other players.
If not, it would still be more matches to get under her belt before the grass-court season and beyond. If health and mindset allow her to be in it for the long haul this timee, that can only be a good thing.
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I thought Bianca looked very fit today. I hope she sticks around.