Victoria Mboko tops Naomi Osaka in Montreal for 1st WTA title
Montreal-Canadian teenager Victoria Mboko finished a dream race on Thursday evening for the National Bank Open, overcoming a slow start to beat the Japanese star Naomi Osaka 2-6, 6-4, 6-1.
Mboko, 18, who will go from 85th to 25th in the world, won his first WTA tour and joined Faye Urban in 1969 and Bianca Andreescu in 2019 as the only Canadians to win the event at home in the open era.
Mboko fell on his knees after Osaka fired a gunshot in the net when a hoarse house broke into the cheers around Center Court. The winner then ran to kiss her family and coaches in the box on the field.
“When I had this moment of victory and so many people were standing and encouraging for me, it was a kind of surreal experience,” Mboko, born in Charlotte, in North Carolina, to the Congolese parents and grew up in Toronto. “I would never have thought that something would have come so suddenly. It just proves that your dreams are closer than they [seem]. “”
The crowd was so rowdy, the referee asked fans on several occasions of “please be silent during the points”.
“It was an incredible week here in Montreal,” Mboko told the crowd, adding “I love you!” in French.
After the match, when the crowd applauded Osaka with mixed howls, she said: “Thank you, I suppose”, and did not congratulate Mboko. Osaka then refused to speak to the media.
There were 13 service breaks in 25 games, Mboko converting eight of the nine break points. And she did it with a steep and swollen wrist which was “difficult to move”.
After falling hard early Wednesday in the third set in the semi-finals, Mboko woke up on Thursday morning and rushed to the hospital for radiographs and an MRI, but finally received the green light to play.
“Today was such an eventful day in fact,” said Mboko, who often shook his wrist in visible discomfort. “It’s incredible right now. I mean, words can’t really describe how today happened.
“There are times when it aggravated me a lot, but I have the impression that it was the final. I kept saying to myself:” You have one more. “”
With its wrist wrapped in a bandage, Mboko accumulated 13 doubles and the speed of its first plunged services.
She beat four main champions in the hard field event, transporting Coco Gauff 6-1, 6-4 and also at the top of Osaka, Sofia Kenin and Elena Rybakina.
Osaka, the quadruple champion of the Grand Slam that reached No. 1 in the world, has experienced its best performance in a WTA 1000 tournament since it also reached the Miami final in 2022. She moved away for 15 months towards the end of this season and had her daughter Shai in July 2023. She is useless since the Australian Open 2021.
Mboko is the third joker to win a WTA 1000 title event, after Maria Sharapova in Cincinnati in 2011 and Andreescu in Indian Wells in 2019. She is also the second most based player to win a WTA 1000 or Tier-1 title since the start of the TIER-1 category in 1990.
The Associated Press and ESPN research contributed to this report.
