Emma Raducanu has prior experience of men with fixations. If we are to fully understand the fear that compelled her to hide behind an umpire’s chair in Dubai on Tuesday, then we should look back to an incident closer to her home. Far closer.
There’s some symmetry in this, because Sunday marks exactly three years since a man stood for sentencing at Bromley Magistrates Court. His name was Amrit Magar.
Now, he went beyond the descriptions of ‘fixated behaviour’ that have flown over from the Middle East across the past week. Magar’s conviction was for stalking and his trial detailed how that looked for Raducanu in a period between November 1 and December 4 of 2021.
Of course, those were the months after she won the US Open as an 18-year-old, and Magar, a delivery driver almost twice her age, was obsessed.
The escalations began with a trip from his residence in north London to south-east suburb of Bromley, where Raducanu was known to live at the time with her parents. Magar, then 35, had found a few specifics online and did the rest by asking around when he got down there – first, he learned the street and eventually the house number.
He would go on to make no fewer than three visits to Raducanu’s family home, occasionally leaving her notes. One of them was a map he had drawn, illustrating the long journey he made on foot to her door that day. ‘23 miles walked 4 you,’ it read. The card attached to a bouquet of flowers went further: ‘Nothing to say but you deserve love.’
Emma Raducanu was left in tears after spotting a man in the crowd displaying ‘fixated behaviour’
Raducanu told the umpire and was visibly distressed as he his behind the umpire’s chair
Raducanu bravely played on, but there have to be concerns about how long she can continue chasing glory after previous experience with a stalker
Another time, he decorated a tree on her front lawn with Christmas lights, and on the last occasion he stole a shoe from the porch. It actually belonged to Raducanu’s father, but Magar didn’t know that. As he told the police, he wanted a ‘souvenir’, and his restraining order is still in force today.
But we forget this stuff pretty quickly, don’t we? As in those of us on the outside, watching, writing, commenting. Those who live it, not so much.
For Raducanu, it isn’t a topic she has discussed in great depth since it happened, but this was the victim statement read on her behalf to court in 2022: ‘I feel like my freedom has been taken away from me. I am constantly looking over my shoulder. I feel on edge and worried this could happen again. I don’t feel safe in my own home, which is where I should feel safest.’
Raducanu was 19 when that appalling change was inflicted on her sense of self. She is 22 now, and we can only speculate about the intentions of a different man at the Dubai Tennis Championships.
But we know from one of her coaches, Roman Kelecic, that the individual had approached Raducanu at four recent tournaments in different countries. Hopping from one Tour spot to the next, he wanted hugs and selfies, mainly, and that crept up to passing her a note when she was alone in Dubai.
Detailing his suspicion that the man had tailed her until she was isolated, Kelecic’s assessment was alarming: ‘He had a strategy that was terrifying, he thought everything through, calculated it.’
None of the behaviour has evidently crossed a certain legal threshold – Raducanu has not pushed forward with charges – but his presence at her second-round match against Karolina Muchova was sufficiently troubling that she collapsed into tears when she spotted him.
If there has been a sadder sight in her short career, then it’s difficult to identify.
The point here is about scar tissue. It’s about the fears Raducanu has acquired through no fault on her part and have attached themselves to a workplace that is tough enough on its own. It’s about factors that are not sporting but live just beneath the surface, ready to fan old traumas, and somehow must be processed as a cost of doing business. Worse, as a sunken cost of success.
It’s heartbreaking, really, and touches on a wider theme that regularly comes to mind when I watch Raducanu.
I often wonder how much enjoyment, true enjoyment, exists in elite sport for those who live it – all the injuries, the critiques, the pressure, the sacrifices in the name of relentless goal-setting and the inevitability that most lose more than they win.
Those observers who seek to balance all of that against earning power probably make a habit of missing the point. I suspect they often miss it with Raducanu, too.
Katarina Johnson-Thompson, the two-time world heptathlon champion, once told me her prime response to finally winning a gold after years of difficulties and neuroses was ‘relief, just relief’.
Katarina Johnson-Thompson has previously spoken about ‘relief’ when winning major titles
It’s the same word that was put ahead of joy by Andy Murray (2013 Wimbledon), Lionel Messi (2022 World Cup), Pep Guardiola (2023 Champions League), Tiger Woods (2019 Masters).
But what happens to those for whom the best came at the very start and then it all tailed off so dramatically? Is there any shadow darker than the one you cast over yourself? Put another way, what will relief look like in the future for Raducanu? And does there come a time when the downsides of this line of work are no longer worth the chase for a woman with a broad hinterland of interests?
No one from these shores has broken through in the way she did, but equally no one has paid so much back to karma in surgeries, defeats, and the inflated expectations of others. She won that US Open in the September; a stalker was in her trees within seven weeks and there the honeymoon ended.
Even if most professionals would swap an arm for what Raducanu has in the cabinet, how often has she seemed happy in the sporting side of her life in the past three and a half years? How regularly has a wave crashed on fleeting moments of promise?
Her win in the first round on Sunday ended the worst run of her career and prompted an upbeat interview on the court about the freedom of walking the streets of Dubai after 11pm. She was buzzing with joy, sounding a bit more like the teenager who danced into our eyeline at Wimbledon a few summers ago. A couple of days later she ran into a ‘fixated’ individual.
It’s been a brutal run on many fronts. I wouldn’t dare to say Raducanu’s life in tennis since New York has been a succession of good decisions and unfair criticisms – that would make me wrong and a hypocrite. I made a few about the balance between her commercial and sporting interests in this space, in this very week, in 2024.
There are other actions she has taken, usually in the churn of her coaches and a reluctance to regain momentum through qualifying tournaments, that warrant discussion. Those conversations are part of sport and so are an athlete’s missteps.
But if anything positive comes from what happened in Dubai, it would be in the form of more empathy for a young athlete whose difficulties have been far ranging.
Thankfully she has time and talent on her side. I’d dearly hope the oddballs of this world allow her to fixate on that.
FIFA flog Club World Cup
FIFA put out a tweet this week carrying a quote from Arsene Wenger to flog their Club World Cup: ‘The new target for a player, the utmost thing, would be to be world champion with your country and world champion with your club.’
In a season where the burnout rate of players has gone beyond dangerous levels, that comment can only have come from someone who is either deluded or sold himself out. If you’ll indulge the indecision, I’m going with both.
FIFA – fronted by Gianni Infantino – have been flogging their Club World Cup this week
Safety not the priority for Saudi showdown
Martin Bakole arrived in Saudi Arabia at a little after 1am on Saturday in order to replace Daniel Dubois in fighting Joe Parker.
That required a flight from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Ethiopia on Friday and another onto Riyadh, where he landed looking heavy, even for a heavyweight.
Irrespective of outcomes, I’m not convinced a boxer’s safety was ever worked into the equations.
