Emma Raducanu was ranked outside the top 100 and entered the 2021 US Open through qualifying. She won ten matches in nineteen days and did not lose a set in any of them, beating Leylah Fernandez in the final.
Why it had not happened
Qualifiers had reached major finals before. None had won one, and none had come through a fortnight of best-of-three tennis without a single set going against them. Physically it is the harder route by three matches; competitively it means playing your first main-draw match with no ranking protection and no seeding for the rest of the draw.
What followed
Very little of it repeated. Raducanu spent the following seasons dealing with injuries and a rapid turnover of coaches, and did not go past the second week of a major again for some time.
That is worth stating plainly rather than treating as a failure. What she did in New York was an outlier by definition — the kind of fortnight the sport produces perhaps once a generation, and which nobody, including the player, should be expected to reproduce on demand.
