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Victoria Mboko began her 2025 season as an 18-year-old kid with braces still on her teeth, down in Martinique at a low-level $30,000 ITF tournament.
She won it, both in singles and doubles.
Fast forward almost exactly and 10 months, Mboko – now 19, her smile now perfection – wrapped up an extraordinary season with another title.
This one came in Hong Kong, very early Sunday morning Canada time, at a WTA 250 in a 7-5, 6-7 (9), 6-2 victory over the gritty Spaniard Cristina Bucsa that took nearly three hours, and quite possibly every bit of energy she had left for this season.
From a ranking of No. 333 when she arrived in Martinique, Mboko will finish the season in the top 20, at No. 18.
“I’m so tired right now,” saidi Mboko, who played with some tape halfway up the left side of her back, in a spot you don’t often see. “Everyone was telling me that this is the best (WTA) 250. So I kind of believe it.”
Highest high, and the aftermath
Between the starting line and the finish line, Mboko won seven matches to take the title at the Omnium Banque Nationale in Montreal in early August. She thrilled the locals, put herself on the map and very likely helped save the bacon of a WTA 1000 event that found itself with five extra days and 85,000 more tickets to sell this year.
If it came a little prematurely on her tennis pathway, you never know when that time will come.
It was a lot, though. And it showed when she arrived at the US Open a few weeks later as a seeded player, after having had to qualify for both Roland Garros and Wimbledon and not being ranked high enough to even think of squeezing into the qualifying at the Australian Open.
She also dealt with a wrist injury that she got through on adrenaline in Montreal.
After the desultory 6-3 6-2 loss to Barbora Krejcikova in New York (admittedly, a tough first-round draw for both), she was off for a full month – long overdue – before heading out on her first Asian swing.
It didn’t go well, even if the draw gods weren’t kind and the fact that she was now a top-25 player didn’t help her much, at first.
In Wuhan, a shorter-version 1000, she was unseeded and drew No. 9 Ekaterina Alexandrova out of the gate. In Ningbo, just out of the seeds, she drew about as tough an opponent as she could have in No. 30 Dayana Yastremska.
Turning it around in Tokyo
But it began to turn around in Tokyo. Originally scheduled to meet counrywoman Leylah Fernandez, a late seed shuffle meant she ended up facing another countrywoman, Bianca Andreescu. Andreescu was struggling equally on the Asian swing, her ranking and confidence dropping, and was a better outcome. Mboko posted her first two wins of the swing there.
In Hong Kong, Mboko came back from a first-set loss to defeat Talia Gibson in the opening round, and then did the same against another rising WTA star in Alexandra Eala.
Then, she caught a break as a clearly not-up-to it Anna Kalinskaya retired down 1-6, 1-3.
And then, a few weeks later than expected, came a semifinal against Fernandez.
An MTO changes everything
Fernandez, who won the Osaka tournament a few weeks before, was finishing her season on a big high.
She was all over Mboko in the first set of their match. And then, even if there wasn’t anything visibly wrong with her movement from the outside, she stopped after holding serve for 2-1 in the second set to have her right thigh taped up.
The tape had been a staple for the last few weeks, so it wasn’t something new. And as sturdy as Fernandez is and as few medical timeouts as she ever takes, it must have been bothering her even if had started the match without that tape on this day.
For whatever reason, it completely turned the match around.
Fernandez seemed to be moving just fine. But the roll she had been on came to an abrupt halt. All the momentum, all the mojo, was gone. And at the same time, the comeback kid started doing her thing.
Another three-set win – a match, in the end, that decided who the No. 1 Canadian for 2025 would be after the two traded spots the previous few weeks.
A grinder of a final against Bucsa
Bucsa, a 27-year-old Moldovan-born Spaniard, is one of those players who just quietly makes her way through the draw every week in both singles and doubles. Sometimes, you don’t see her coming (ask Andreescu, who found that out in Australia a few years ago). And she always gives full value.
She doesn’t seem like that much – no big serve, no seemingly huge weapons. But she moves beautifully, is very consistent, knows when to pull the trigger on a winner and, most pertinently, can take both her groundstrokes down the line with ease.
Down 2-5 in the first set, Bucsa evened it at 5-5 before Mboko pulled away.
Down 0-3 in the second set – it was 0-4 before a line call was challenged and overturned – she pulled that set out 11-9 in the tiebreak.
And she kept battling in the third set; it was her first career WTA-level final, and she rose to the occasion. But Mboko’s winning DNA shone through.
What’s next? Billie Jean King Cup?
In 10 months (including that one-month break after the US Open), Mboko played a total of 87 matches with all levels of tournament combined.
She went 60-14 in singles, and 8-5 in doubles.
She travelled to 13 countries – some of them multiple times, playing tournaments in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Rome (Georgia), Manchester, Macon (france), Porto, Miami, Tokyo for her Billie Jean King Cup debut, Saint-Malo, Rome (Italy), Parma, Paris, Wimbledon, Washington, Montreal, Beijing, Ningo, Tokyo and Hong Kong.
That’s a lot – most especially for a player who spent much of her junior career injured, took several breaks, and appeared at Wimbledon this year with knee taping that got more extensive with every match.
Mentally, as well, it was a lot to digest. And the off-court obligations obviously increased even if a lot of opportunities were turned down.
And at the moment, Mboko isn’t done. She’s on the roster for the Billie Jean King Cup playoff ties in Mexico in two weeks.
(Hopefully – and of course they didn’t ask me – she will gracefully bow out).
When the 2026 season starts up in Australia in two months – her first Aussie summer – she will have a target on her back. The opponents will have scouted her a lot more thoroughly, found her vulnerabilities, and be even that much more motivated to beat her.
And after this world tour, it will no longer be new, and fun, and exciting. It will feel a LOT more like a job.
It’s hard to imagine she won’t win the WTA’s Newcomer of the Year award.
What a debut.
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