![]() Second, that ‘she came out of nowhere’ can also be seen through the increasingly powerful discourse of ethno-nationalisms associated with the extreme right wing, fascist facilitating forces, in global politics, including the dominant fraction in Johnson’s Tory government that is shaping current British political discourse. Yet this in itself is among the least of the cliché’s dangers. That ‘she came out of nowhere’ reinforces one of sports’ most powerful fantasies of ‘natural talent’ as being enough. ![]() This response is entirely factually correct – but facts are of little use in rebutting ideology with its common sense power and affective appeals to emotional truths. The phrase invites an empirical response of the kind that goes: ‘OK, you may say that but you’re missing years of training, playing the circuit, county competitions and more’. In doing so, however, we can see a concealment of this ideology-work. Not only is this fantasy powerful, it is also a formative force in contemporary corporatized, capitalist sport – but before we go there, the phrase does at least two the things of note.įirst, to use the ‘she came out of nowhere’ cliché as much as they do does no favours to the commentariat it makes them seem unaware of the sport they are reporting on. The most obvious bit of ideology-work this phrase does is maintain the fantasy of sporting genius and meritocracy as a necessary explanation for the explosion on the scene of a previously unknown, prodigious new talent (sport is only one of many cultural industries that maintain this fantasy – music does something similar). Easy as that may be, it is dangerous: one of the really interesting things about clichés of this kind is not how often the commentariat use them, but how we take them for granted and therefore the sort of ideology-work they do. It’s easy for us to look at that and treat it as some kind of vacuous journalistic space filler, as a kind of ‘um’ before moving on to the next point of substance. ![]() Much of the discussion – in various media settings, across metaphorical (for those of us working from home) or actual water coolers and no doubt other settings – has included some version of the statement that ‘she came out of nowhere’. The cliché that has been most prevalent in the UK (at least) is more insidious, in part because it is seemingly less problematic. ![]() Much of this was associated with her 4 th round withdrawal at Wimbledon – although the assorted assertions of a lack of ‘resilience’ (a laudable virtue made dangerous by its appropriation in neo-liberal valorisation) look shallow, as do the patronising ‘cut her some slack, she’s just a kid’ (as opposed to a novice) approaches (which I found myself checking in my mid-summer responses, the infantilisation of women athletes is a powerful force). Of course, we have had them with much of the coverage of Răducanu’s summer soaked in forms of awe at ‘magical runs’ combined with variously subtle and explicit infantilisation and denigration. It’s a story that is crying out for mythologizing, fairy tale clichés from the sporting and other commentariat. Emma Răducanu during a 2018 Wimbledon qualifying match (source Wikicommons) At the beginning of the summer neither was ranked in the top 50 (Răducanu was ranked 150), and both make their only slightly younger peer Coco Gauff, with a couple of seasons in the main draw under her belt, seem old at 17 (let alone Serena Williams who’d won four Grand Slams singles titles before Răducanu was born). It becomes even more improbable when we see that she had beaten last month’s Olympic champion and didn’t drop a set in the two week competition, or when we saw (or learn) that she’d fallen worryingly at a key moment in the final, that she’d expected to be knocked out of the competition early on so that when she picked up the trophy her flight home was nearly a fortnight ago, and that her opponent in the final, Leylah Fernandez, was also a teenage (relative) newcomer. Class background aside, the summer of struggles and successes is more like the plot line of an improbable but emotionally powerful made-for-TV movie than professional sport. After all, here the winner was an 18 year old qualifier playing in her second Grand Slam having only been in the WTA main draw for 4 months (after a wildcard entry at Nottingham in June 2021). It’d take a certain level of curmudgeon not to have been even just a little bit taken by the women’s competition at the 2021 US (Tennis) Open, and the seemingly irresistible rise of Emma Răducanu.
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