The columnists' racket: After one grand slam win, Emma Raducanu is the British media's new weird obsession...
For columnists, she's now a symbol of whatever the hell they need her to be.
Previously: Cyanide Sunday — A run through today's columns reveals the British media at its most deranged
The notion that newspapers and the wider media build people up just to later knock them down is a well established one. In Emma Raducanu’s case, that cycle has already happened once. She was feverishly hyped during Wimbledon only to be castigated by qualified old wankers (John McEnroe) and unqualified old wankers (Piers Morgan) alike after withdrawing for medical reasons during the fourth round of the tournament.
Raducanu’s decision to retire after suffering what appeared to be a panic attack was rolled up with coverage of Naomi Osaka’s decision to skip Wimbledon and the French Open as she dealt with depression and anxiety, and Simone Biles’ sensible and professional withdrawal from some Olympic events.
Morgan — with his ongoing stalkerish obsession with commenting on and analysing the life and career choices of young women, particularly young women of colour — even repeated his “choker” jibe on the even of Raducanu’s US Open triumph this weekend.
But if the grim criticism from men who should but never will know better was bad, the fetishising features and bizarre commentary following her win may be even worse. I covered India Knight’s clumsy accidentally racist anti-racist paean to Raducanu, which actually managed to be weirdly obsessed with the player’s body and ethnic background, yesterday but her colleague Libby Purves has managed to out ick her in only the first paragraph of her column today.
While Knight provoked paroxysms of cringe writing of her desire to call Raducanu “Emma, or maybe Em or Emmy” and a scene “outside Aldeburgh literary festival on Thursday [where] the artist Maggi Hambling started a heartfelt chant upon hearing the name”, Purves begins:
How must it have felt to be a young Afghan woman, hearing about that tennis final or (across some border) even seeing it? How shocked or inspired might you be by two teenage girls thrilling the world with their agility, skill and split-second mental reflexes? What comfort might you take from knowing about Emma Raducanu’s starry maths and economics A-levels, and Leylah Fernandez fresh from her high-school diploma and driving lessons?
Would their triumph — because a match like that is a triumph for both — make you feel bitterly despairing that female freedom, education and dignity are being slammed down again in your own nation?
Or would you, Afghana, manage to hope that the atavistic, bullying doctrines of the Taliban will now be seen even more clearly as the aberration they are, and scorned by a saner world?
It repeats the same queasy fetishisation present in Knight’s column but combines it with a horrible novelistic imagination of an Afghan refugee girl glued to the TV coverage of Raducanu and Leylah Fernandez’ match. Who is this imaginary girl who has been poring over the players’ Wikipedia pages and thinking columnist’s thoughts about the parallels between their lives and hers?
And once the imagined Afghan girl dissipates, her rhetorical use to Purves at an end, there are still telling lines to be picked at. Purves writes:
Emma Raducanu didn’t need to win the final to delight us, but she did. She emerged to hug the loser on court and say with the characteristic quiet politeness people at her club talk about: “I think both of us were playing some unbelievable tennis . . . I hope we play each other in many more tournaments.”
Raducanu dominates the front pages, news, features and comment sections now because she has delighted “us”. She will fill them just as quickly the moment that she says or does something that runs contrary to what those same newspapers are pushing at a particular moment or simply once the time comes for a fairytale story to have some more monstrous interest in it.
Just as the lede of Knight’s piece yesterday (“The brilliant Emma Raducanu is half Romanian, half Chinese and all ours…”) demanded ownership of the young player and the copy literally objectified her in a list of British things (“Britishness is a maypole on a Kentish village green, or a chicken curry, or a pint of warm beer. Or Emma Raducanu.”), Purves statement of the obvious — young women can be and are strong — comes with a side order of weirdness:
… a young female adult, still perhaps with a heartbreaking childlike curve of the cheek (Emma Raducanu still has that!) will always risk being intellectually and physically underrated.
Could it be that the paper Purves writes for, its Sunday version, and its tabloid cousin The Sun, with its cheaper thesaurus, and more obvious taste for boiling women down to bikini fillers, might have a role in that intellectual and physical underrating of young women? We’ll never know…
Having opened with the industrially-patronising imagining of an Afghan refugee with the time and headspace to ponder two relatively privileged tennis players competing for more money than she would ever be likely to make in a ten lifetimes, Purves ends with on an equally cringe-inducing note:
Remember how a school-leaver emerged from a pandemic year, aced two A-levels, got over being medically withdrawn mid-match at Wimbledon and patronised by middle-aged men, then breezed back a few weeks later and made sporting history. Open the door for her, chaps, by all means. But bow deeply as you do so.
Yes, remember that, chaps. Especially if you’re a sportswriter for The Times or one of the many men stealing a living in its comment section.
Over at The Daily Telegraph, which fills its features sections with the same pseudo-celebrity guff about Raducanu’s future earnings just like The Times, Judith Woods gets ahead of the pack by starting the concern trolling early. Beneath an awe-inspiringly awful headline best imagined in the voice of an acid-tongued aunt leaning over a garden fence — Emma Raducanu has become the nation’s perfect daughter – I just hope it doesn’t backfire — Woods writes:
For as the mothers of Britain beamed with vicarious pride at the 18-year-old’s shiny hair, clean-scrubbed complexion and unprecedented tennis talent, our teenage daughters’ reaction was altogether more complex...
“Yeah, she’s a decent enough player. Sure, she looks OK in her Nike gear. The money’s good. But all the fuss my mum’s making is a bit cringe. She’s from Bromley for pity’s sake! That’s not even proper London; it’s in Kent.”
Bless. How could the nation’s teenagers not feel a pinch resentful of the giddily high benchmark that has suddenly been set by this rank outsider-turned global superstar? She is every mother-of-a-teenager-daughter’s dream.
Here is a young woman who has not only made Grand Slam history but bagged an A* in maths and an A in economics in her A levels, thereby reducing their middle-aged mothers to swooning fan girls.
Like Knight who turned Raducanu into an object to be coveted and Purves who noted her “quiet politeness” — best that continues is the implication, lest the media find she’s falling short of standards it’s applied arbitrarily — Woods claims the teenager for the “middle-aged mothers” of Britain.
Suddenly, Raducanu is not simply an increasingly brilliant tennis player, an individual who is on the rise, but a symbol to be deployed by the columnists and wielded as a weapon in wars with their own teenage children (themselves frequently turned into ‘content’ for hand-wringing pieces about the “younger generation” and its myriad failings).
This is parental cruelty about the achievements of other people’s kids played out on the pages of a national newspaper. Woods continues:
My own daughters, aged 19 and 13 have not only accused me of maternal treachery but banned me from ever again mentioning polyglot Raducanu’s ability to speak three languages. Including Mandarin, you know.
The outpouring of admiration from mothers is especially hard to accept because the tennis prodigy is such an all-rounder. No sign of tattoos either.
No. Sign. Of. Tattoos. Either. Woe-betide Raducanu ever get a tattoo or choose an “unsuitable” partner. The concern trolls of the tabloids and tabloid-flavoured broadsheets will be on her in an instant.
Columnists like Woods will turn so quickly once the “beautiful, brilliant tennis player” with her “great hair”, “grammar school education” and “niceness” says one word that they dislike or doesn’t deliver the imaginary teenage dream that they want to use to shame their own vaguely disappointing offspring.
In the course of one US Open run, Raducanu has gone from a human woman to an avatar to be played with by every creepy columnist in Britain. Elsewhere in The Times, a headline shrieks, Grace, good looks (and fluent Mandarin) will net Emma Raducanu a fortune, while another leers over her “little black dress”.
Woods also joins Purves in trying to weld Raducanu’s win to the plight of Afghan women and girls in the crassest and clumsiest way possible. She writes:
Right now [Raducanu] absolutely deserves the world’s fanfare – but we should also bear in mind that as we fete one girl’s unique victory, 14 million girls and women in Afghanistan have just been banned from playing sport at any level.
According to the Taliban, the picking up a bat or the kicking of a ball are un-Islamic for women because in such instances their faces would be uncovered which is not permitted under their deeply misogynistic and deliberately oppressive interpretation of Sharia Law.
The contrast could not be starker nor more shocking. That’s not to say Raducanu should become any sort of political poster girl, but we would do well to remember that the chances she was given and the opportunities she seized are not open to all girls everywhere.
And it is this fact we must impress upon our daughters. They are growing up in a country where their gender doesn’t impact their human rights, where they can strive to be the best sporting, active version of themselves, whatever that looks like.
Way to place the failings and hubris of the last 20 years of a 150-year abusive relationship between the West and Afghanistan on the shoulders of a woman who wasn’t even alive when Britain and the US marched into the country. And the notion that the UK is some utopia where "gender doesn’t impact human rights” is a particularly columnist-brained take.
The Daily Mail hoots One step from a DAME! Britain's new queen of tennis Emma Raducanu, 18, 'is set to be one of the youngest CBE recipients ever' after stunning US Open win saw her congratulated by Her Majesty, highlighting another aspect of the curséd mentality of post-Brexit Britain: Any success must be leapt upon, codified and claimed immediately. It used to be that sport stars were honoured after a whole career, now needy governments try to hold them close after their first major successes.
Of course, the Mail can’t avoid some concern trolling mixed with an unhealthy dose of fetishising Raducanu as above the petty concerns of “typical teens”. David Smith writes a report beneath a headline — Emma Raducanu has become an overnight icon with her US Open win but I'm certain she can avoid the pitfalls of being a teenage tennis star — which, if viewed through the They Live sunglasses, would read: “Nice newly-gained role model status. Shame if anything were to happen to it.”
Smith begins the piece with the same kind of weird fetishisation of Raducanu as “super-teen” as we saw from the other columnists. He writes:
Visiting San Francisco for the first time, many British teenagers might gravitate towards the fabled Golden Gate Bridge, but few would know much about its origins.
Away from the tennis court, as well as on it, however, 18-year-old Emma Raducanu is the exception.
While playing a tournament in the city last month, she marvelled at the ‘1930s genius’ of its designer, Joseph Baermann Strauss, whose work she had studied at her selective girls’ grammar school in south-east London.
For Raducanu to be celebrated all other British teenagers must be denigrated; a bunch of thickos beside her shining intellect and punishing serve. Smith goes on:
Moving on to Chicago a few days later, Emma didn’t spend her downtime lolling on the lakeside beach with her iPhone, like some of her young rivals. Instead she ticked off another item on her extensive ‘bucket-list’: seeing The Bean, the quirky Anish Kapoor sculpture in Millennium Park.
Her musical tastes are similarly eclectic and unconventional, she says, with a Spotify playlist ranging from Afro-pop to obscure Taiwanese rap.
Instilled by her Romanian father and Chinese mother, Renee, the advantage of Emma’s rounded education shines through whenever we see her.
Indeed, the eloquent and measured victory speech she delivered (in elocution English) on Saturday night, was almost as impressive as her sensational performance.
It will stand her in good stead now she has become an overnight icon, helping to keep her grounded when the expectations placed on her threaten to become overwhelming.
This is classic media misdirection: Where do those “expectations” come from? And who “placed” them on her? Well, in large part, they come from people like Smith and papers like The Daily Mail.
He and his editors are setting her up for a fall that they will no doubt delight in when it comes by framing her as the perfect teenager. Not for her looking at her iPhone, she doesn’t “lol on the beach” like “some” of her rivals. No, she is an architecture-hunting, selectively-schooled, super-woman. And best she keeps it up because the Mail and its parasite paparazzi outriders will be watching.
Observing in a no way creepy manner that he has spent “40 years reporting [on] prodigious teenage girls,” Smith then compares Raducanu to ‘poor’ Jennifer Capriati — who had a far tougher start in life and still went on to win the US and Australian opens as well as earning millions of dollars — and Mary Pearce with her “enviable body”.
Trying to dodge the kind of criticism I’m now writing, Smith says:
Some might think it untimely to hark back to these grim stories when we are celebrating the greatest achievement by any female British tennis player. Yet they serve to emphasise what a fantastic job her family have done.
But it’s apparent what he and the Mail are up to: Telling a ‘good’ immigrant story to contrast with their villainisation of refugees crossing the channel (a neighbour is quoted talking about how “well-brought-up” and “hardworking” Raducanu’s parents are) while hinting at how the coverage will go if Emma ever slips below the paper’s requirements for a golden girl.
Even Martin Samuel, The Daily Mail sportswriter, is unable to avoid being odd in a column that is otherwise a sensible explanation of just how sensational her US Open Win actually was (“There really is no comparable achievement to claiming a Grand Slam tennis tournament as a teenage pre-qualifier.”). He goes on to attempt bizarre comparisons to Johnny Boy in Martin Scorcese’s Mean Streets and the exploding head moment in Scanners before indulging in some side-bar of shame style fashion critique:
She needn't have worried about approval, of course. New York loves her, as it always loves winners. Later, in a black cocktail dress, hair perfect, killer earrings worn with the confidence of youth, she wowed again.
There is no greater accolade in Daily Mail world than “wowing in a little black dress”. It puts Raducanu one step closer to an even greater accolade: The Liz Jones Award for Achievement in Having Legs.
Emma Raducanu is fantastic. Her tennis speaks for itself. But that cannot and will not ever be enough for the newspapers and particularly for columnists who have to take a new star-like Raducanu and shape her to fit things they already wanted to write. An 18-year-old superstar can never be allowed to simply be a brilliant tennis player; she has to be a symbol, an icon, a treatise on identity, and a cosh to beat other teenagers with.
And soon enough she’ll be just another character to tear down for her failings — real or imagined — and Piers Morgan will have the column ready, his finger poised to press send, his smirk as wide as his giant pumpkin head.
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Very accurate and very depressing.
I daresay you'll put a bookmark on this one, because the chances that you'll have to quote extensively from it somewhere in the next 2 years are very high indeed.