Before Victoria Mboko was the powerful wildcard who dispatched three Grand Slam champions at the Canadian Open this week, she was a four-year-old on a tennis court in Burlington, Ont., demanding to be fed balls to hit while her siblings trained.
Pierre Lamarche remembers Mboko standing on the baseline of the court as he coached her sister, Gracia, who is 10 years her senior and a talented tennis player in her own right who competed at the national level.
“That’s how it all started,” Lamarche, who eventually coached Mboko, too, told CBC’s Heather Hiscox Thursday morning.
The day before, Mboko, now 18, had eked out a win in the Canadian Open semifinal against 2022 Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina, 26. After losing the first set, Mboko mounted a nail-biting comeback.
“I knew that last night was gonna be a very tough match,” said Lamarche, noting Mboko lost to Rybakina 6-3, 7-5 two weeks ago in the quarterfinals of the Washington Open.
Canada’s Victoria Mboko completes epic comeback to reach National Bank Open final
Lamarche worried Rybakina’s style of play would be trickier for his former student to face, but he says Mboko’s performance “and really, her attitude of no fear, just showed up again. And she just hates losing so much that she competes at a level that I’ve never seen an athlete compete [at].”
Mboko’s former coach says her comeback against Rybakina in some ways echoed her very foundations in the sport.
She learned to play with her sister, and Lamarche recalls that Mboko hated losing to her so much that when it happened, “she would kind of sulk,” despite being so much younger.
