Canadian teenager Victoria Mboko completed a dream run to the National Bank Open title Thursday night, overcoming a slow start to beat Japanese star Naomi Osaka 2-6, 6-4, 6-1.
The 18-year-old Mboko, who will jump from 85th to 25th in the world, won her first WTA Tour title and joined Faye Urban in 1969 and Bianca Andreescu in 2019 as the only Canadians to win the Montreal event in the Open era.
Mboko dropped to her knees after Osaka fired a shot into the net as a raucous packed house burst into cheers around center court. The winner then ran to hug her family and coaches in the courtside box.
“When I had that winning moment and seeing so many people standing up and cheering for me, it was kind of a surreal experience,” said Mboko, who was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, to Congolese parents and grew up in Toronto. “I would have never thought something like this would have came so suddenly. It just proves that your dreams are closer than they [seem].”
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The crowd was so rowdy that the umpire repeatedly asked fans to “please be quiet during the points.”
“It’s been 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 some yelling mixed in, she said, “Thanks, I guess,” and did not congratulate Mboko. Osaka later declined to speak to the media.
There were 13 service breaks in 25 games, with Mboko converting 8 of 9 break points. And she did it with a stiff and swollen wrist that was “hard to move.”
After falling hard early Wednesday in the third set in the semifinals, Mboko woke up Thursday morning and rushed to the hospital for X-rays and an MRI. She ultimately received the green light to play.
“Today was such an eventful day actually,” said Mboko, who often shook her wrist in visible discomfort. “It feels unbelievable right now. I mean, words cannot really describe how today went.
“There’s some moments where it was aggravating me a lot, but I feel like it was the final. I just kept saying to myself, ‘You have one more to go.'”
With her wrist wrapped in a bandage, Mboko piled up a whopping 13 double-faults, and the speed of her first serves dipped.
She beat four major champions in the hard-court event, routing top-seeded Coco Gauff 6-1, 6-4 and also topping Osaka, Sofia Kenin and Elena Rybakina.
Osaka, the four-time Grand Slam champion who reached No. 1 in the world, had her best performance in a WTA 1000 tournament since reaching the Miami final in 2022. She stepped away for 15 months toward the end of that season and had daughter Shai in July 2023. She is winless since the 2021 Australian Open.
Mboko is the third wild card to win a WTA 1000 title event, following Maria Sharapova at Cincinnati in 2011 and Andreescu at Indian Wells in 2019. She is the second-lowest-ranked player to win either a WTA 1000 or Tier-1 title since the Tier-1 category began in 1990.
The Associated Press and ESPN Research contributed to this report.
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