Victoria Mboko advances to Montreal final after another major upset
Victoria Mboko continued her remarkable run at Canada’s most prestigious tennis tournament, defeating ninth-seed Elena Rybakina on Wednesday night to advance to the final of the WTA 1000-level event.
Mboko saved a match point to come away with the 1-6, 7-5, 7-6(4) victory in the semifinals of the National Bank Open presented by Rogers, putting the 18-year-old through to her first WTA Tour singles final.
In just her seventh tour-level main draw tournament, Mboko became the first Canadian to defeat three former Grand Slam champions in a single WTA event. In the semifinals she took down the 2022 Wimbledon champion in Rybakina. She had gotten through the Round of 16 with a stunning straight sets (6-1, 6-4) victory over top seed Coco Gauff, this year’s French Open champion as well as the 2023 US Open champion. In the second round, Mboko defeated Sofia Kenin, the 2020 Australian Open champion, in straight sets.
Mboko is just the fourth Canadian woman (but also the youngest) to reach the final of this tournament in the Open Era, following Faye Urban in 1968 and 1969, Vicky Berner in 1969, and Bianca Andreescu in 2019. She will be the first Canadian to play in the WTA final in Montreal, after those previous finals appearances all came when the tournament took place in Toronto.
Ranked 85th in the world at the start of the tournament, Mboko is just the third wild card entry to reach the final of the Canadian Open. She is now guaranteed to be in the top 40 of the WTA rankings after starting the year outside the top 300.
Mboko will face another illustrious opponent in the final, four-time Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka, who defeated 16th-seed Clara Tauson 6-2, 7-6(7) to advance to her first WTA 1000-level final since 2022. The final gets underway at 6:00 p.m ET on Thursday and can be watched on Sportsnet and TVA Sports.
The semifinal did not start well for Mboko, who lost all three of her service games in the first set. But she turned it around in the second set, and despite losing leads of 3-0 and 5-3, she won the last two games to force a third set. Early in that decider, Mboko fell at the back of the court, landing hard on her wrist. During the next changeover, she took a medical timeout and played on with her wrist taped.
The third set lasted more than an hour, with Rybakina serving for the match at 5-4 and 6-5. But it went the distance to the tiebreak, as the crowd cheered Mboko on with shouts of “Allez Vicky!”.
“It’s been a crazy night for me”, Mboko said in her post-match press conference. “For my first-ever final of a 1000, it’s unbelievable to even think about it, and I’m just really happy to be here and just to celebrate it with all the Canadian fans that came to watch.”
