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Bouchard has made a near-seamless transition to the professional ranks, a model of patience that could serve as a template for other young players.
Aaron Favila / AP
Eugenie Bouchard of Canada, holding stuffed doll of wombat, celebrates after defeating Ana Ivanovic of Serbia during their quarter-final at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2014.
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MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA—Eugenie Bouchard is in the Australian Open semifinals because she never thought she wasn’t supposed to be.
With a sense of purpose and belonging on the big stage that eludes many more experienced players, Bouchard came back to defeat Ana Ivanovic 5-7, 7-5, 6-2 in her quarter-final match Tuesday, playing proactive, fearless tennis even in the tightest moments of the match.
Bouchard, a 19-year-old who goes by “Genie,” came to Melbourne last year ranked No. 145 and lost in the second round of the preliminary qualifying draw.
This year, Bouchard came to Melbourne ranked 31st after a season of rapid but steady improvement that earned her the WTA Newcomer of the Year award. Seeded 30th, she avoided facing another seeded player as she capably navigated her way through the first four rounds. In the quarter-finals, she overcame the 14th-seeded Ivanovic, a resurgent former No. 1 who had shocked the top seed Serena Williams in the fourth round.
“You gotta start from the bottom and now we’re here, right?” Bouchard joked in an interview on the eve of her quarter-final, co-opting lyrics from the Canadian rapper Drake.
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Bouchard, a Montreal native, is the first Canadian to advance to a Grand Slam semifinal since Carling Bassett at the 1984 U.S. Open.
By reaching the quarter-finals, Bouchard also became the first Canadian to advance further than all American men and women in the singles draws at a Grand Slam in the Open Era, which began in 1968.
Though normally nonchalant about her achievements, that particular North American supremacy appealed to Bouchard immediately.
“That’s really cool!” she said. “That’s an honour. I’ll take that.”
In her semifinal match Thursday, Bouchard will take on fourth-seeded Li Na, a two-time finalist in Melbourne. Li lost only four games in her 6-2, 6-2 romp over No. 28 Flavia Pennetta in Tuesday’s first quarterfinal.
In Bouchard, Li will face a player exactly 12 years younger than Pennetta, to the day.
While many are surprised by just how quickly her success has come, Bouchard, who said she tries to act like she’s “been there before” on the biggest stages of the sport, is not one of them.
“I do try to walk around like I belong there, and play like I belong, and every time I walk on the court I believe I can win,” she said. “I think that’s really important, to have that self-confidence. Off the court, I think I’m not cocky, I’m pretty humble, and I don’t want to act like I’ve been there when I haven’t. But when little things come, like winning some matches at Slams, I just try to take it in stride. Because I expect a lot from myself.
“So when it does happen, it’s like O.K., I knew I could do this, and now let’s go to the next thing.”
Following her to each next thing at this tournament has been the “Genie Army,” a group of Australian fans who dress in red and white and sing and chant during her matches. Starting in the second round, a member of the group has given her a stuffed animal after each victory. Four wins later, Bouchard has a plush menagerie of Australian wildlife, with a kangaroo, a koala, a kookaburra and a wombat.
Though Bouchard seems to have inspired more than a few crushes among many of the fans supporting her here in Australia, she speaks with an unabashed jockishness that few on the WTA Tour can match. In news conferences, she is more comfortable answering questions about her tactics and strategy than the minutiae of her personal life. Asked whose interviews she most enjoys watching, Bouchard pointed to the top of two sports.
“I like watching Tiger Woods talk after he wins a tournament, or obviously in tennis I love Roger. So I always say Roger for everything,” she said, referring to Roger Federer, who will take on Andy Murray in their quarter-final on Wednesday.
Though many of the teenagers competing in junior events believe they have outgrown the junior circuit before their eligibility is up, Bouchard stayed and took advantage of the opportunity for high-pressure competition. After playing her first junior Grand Slam at age 14, she eventually won the girls’s title at Wimbledon in 2012 when she was 18, an age at which most players her age compete only in professional events.
But having allowed her talent to fully ripen before moving beyond the junior ranks, Bouchard has made a near-seamless transition to the professional ranks, a model of patience that could serve as a template for other young players.
Bouchard has employed a coach in Nick Saviano who serves as a link between her junior and senior success. Saviano has helped develop the games of other emerging young talents, like the American Sloane Stephens and the Briton Laura Robson, but it was Bouchard with whom Saviano decided to travel on the tour, having previously turned down several offers from players over the years.
For Saviano, Bouchard’s willingness and ability to learn was a deciding factor.
“She can process information very quickly, and she applies it,” Saviano said of Bouchard, who first worked with her when she was 12. “She’s a very good athlete, she has good focus, and she has other factors. She feels comfortable on a big stage, which helps.”
Saviano believes that Bouchard is capable of raising her game to a level where simply playing her own game can be enough to beat anyone.
“She’ll make tactical adjustments, and so on, but it’s more about her developing her skills and being able to impose her skills on other people as opposed to constantly reacting to everyone else,” he said. “When you watch Nadal or Federer or Serena Williams or Sharapova, they make little adjustments, but basically you’re seeing them impose their game on other people, and that’s the mentality I want you to see from her.”
As she begins to be mentioned in the same breath as those champions, there is only one aspect of Bouchard’s life that betrays her age: her defiant, longstanding adoration of the Canadian pop idol Justin Bieber.
When asked after her quarter-final win about which celebrity she would most like to date, Bouchard hesitantly named Bieber, and the answer was met with laughs and boos from the crowd of 15,000.
Though she has not yet met Bieber, who is four days younger than she is, Bouchard is convinced that one day she will.
“Don’t worry, it’s going to happen,” she said. “Yes. But I think I need to do something bigger to get his attention, like win a Slam, something like that. I won’t even have to do anything, and maybe he’ll just reach out, and we’ll tweet or something like that.”
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