Mirra Andreeva manages to achieve one teenage tennis prodigy after another

Mirra Andreeva showed up at tennis midway through last season, like the new kid at school whose mother or father has just transferred to the local branch.

One day no one had ever heard of her, the next day she was all anyone was talking about: 16 years old, three days into the online version of her freshman year of high school, complaining about homework and taking over of the Australian Open. She performs a miracle every other day and then talks about it with equal parts sophistication, self-deprecation, humor and sarcasm in her third language (Russian and French are one and two), better than many people can in their first language.

Recently, Andreeva defeated Ons Jabeur, the three-time Grand Slam finalist and her female tennis idol, playing near-flawless tennis en route to a 6-0, 6-2 at Rod Laver Arena, the same court where she lost the match. junior final here last year. On Friday, Andreeva performed a different kind of miracle. She recovered from losing the first set to Diane Parry 6-1 to draw, but somehow climbed out of a 5-1 hole in the third set, saving two match points and coming up 6- 5 ahead, but then failed to serve out. the match, but quickly recovered to blow out Parry in the decisive tiebreak 10–5.

She grabbed her face, hid an embarrassed smile, then started fishing wristbands out of her bag and tossing them into the rapturous Australian crowd that had fallen for all her charms over the past week.

An hour later, she was back on earth, feet firmly on the ground, or as much as they could be, on her rocket ride into the spotlight of the game she loves.

“I'm okay with what's happening,” Andreeva said with a wry smile to a handful of adults double or triple her age. 'Maybe if I win a slam. I still have three games to win and it is very difficult to win seven games in a row.”

Andreeva is not like other teenage girls, or maybe she is, but just with a tennis taste after the habits of youth.

At the end of each day, she turns off the light in her room and talks to herself about what happened.

She watches a lot of videos on her computer and phone, but it's often an old tennis match. She is very familiar with the greatest hits of Martina Hingis, the Swiss prodigy whose smooth and powerful basic playing is often compared to hers.

She ogles her palpitations. He happens to be a 36-year-old married man with four children, a receding hairline and a metal hip: Andy Murray. After her win on Friday, he praised her mental strength on X, formerly Twitter, and suggested she owes her success to how tough she can be on herself, even if that hasn't served her well in the past. More about that later.

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For Andreeva this was everything.

“To be honest, I didn't really think he would watch a game and after he tweeted he would say something,” she said. “I'll try to print it somehow. I don't know, I'll put it in a list. I will take it everywhere. Maybe I'll hang it on the wall so I can see it every day.”

On the field, Andreeva is a series of tantalizing contradictions. She doesn't seem fast, but somehow always has her feet behind the ball. She is small. She doesn't seem to swing that hard, but she can make the ball fly off her strings. At the most crucial moments on Friday, a calm settled over her as Parry panicked, although Andreeva says that's not exactly what it felt like in her head.

She said she felt quite confident after crushing Parry in the second set. She had won five straight matches, had multiple service breaks, and just had to keep doing what she was doing.

Then she lost her own serve, missed her chances to get back on serve at 2-0 and before she knew it she was 5-1 down. She looked at the scoreboard and noticed the absurdity of a match that could end 6-1, 1-6, 6-1, so she made it her mission to win one game so that the score of the final set would be at least 6-. 2.

After match point at 5-2, she rushed to the net and thought: 'Am I crazy? Do I go to the net on match point?” But then Parry missed.

At 5-3 she felt her adrenaline rising and she really wanted to win again. She then got two quick points on Parry's serve, but gave them back after missed returns. Her inner voice told her, “God, okay, that's it.”

The next two 'crazy points' were a blur of running and swinging. When she won them, she knew she had the mental advantage, the energy flowing through her and out of Parry. Even when she couldn't serve out the match at 6-5, she still knew she had come this far back.

“It was like, 'Okay, six all, I didn't think that was it,'” she said. “I already knew I was going to win, but I just have to do everything I can.”

Andreeva's connections to the Australian Open run deep. Andreeva is a tennis prodigy and enjoys rewatching old matches in her spare time, and the 2017 final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal is a favorite. But the ties actually started two years before her birth, when her mother, Raisa, became hooked on the sport and watched Marat Safin win the men's singles title in 2005. Within a few years, she brought Mirra's older sister, Ericka, with her. is now also a professional, taking lessons, with Mirra in tow.

This was inside Krasnoyarsk, a city of a million inhabitants in Siberia, in the middle of the largest country in the world – not exactly a tennis paradise. When the girls began to thrive on the court, Raisa moved them to Sochi on the Black Sea, a much warmer environment and the breeding ground of Maria Sharapova, and then to Cannes, France, where they enrolled in a tennis academy and are still based . . An IMG recruiter found her when she was a scruffy, undersized 12-year-old and called corporate headquarters.

She burst onto the scene at the Madrid Open last year when she was just 15 years old one of the youngest players to defeat a top 20 opponent, Beatriz Haddad Maia of Brazil. She then did it again in the next match, beating Magda Linette from Poland, who was twice her age.

She won five matches at the French Open, including qualifiers, and two at Wimbledon, her first major match on grass, before her teenage head emerged and erased her losses: a ball hit into the crowd in Paris, a racket perhaps thrown at Wimbledon. that cost her an important point. She swore she dropped it and didn't throw it.

At the US Open she met the in-form Coco Gauff in the second round and was comfortably defeated.

She has since parted ways with her coach, Jean-Rene Lisnardthe former Monaco pro, and uses a temporary coach, Kirill Krioukov, a Russian who worked with Andreeva and her sister when they were younger.

She tries to balance the academic challenges of high school life without the social benefits, a dynamic that doesn't always work out so great. Growing up as a teenage phenomenon is not for everyone.

That is not a problem for the time being, not now that she becomes owner of Melbourne Park and enters the second week of a Grand Slam for the second time in seven months. She likes this life just fine.

“I like being here,” she said, not just talking about Australia. “I like to travel all over the world. I'm okay with what's happening.”

(Top photo: Robert Prange/Getty Images)