WHAT HAS GONE WRONG FOR JACK DRAPER AND EMMA RADUCANU?
After another grim night for British tennis left Jack Draper weeping in agony and despair, it almost feels as if the nation’s players are dealing with some sort of collective curse. Could Great Britain be the most injury-wracked nation in the tennis world?
Of nine Britons who have spent time in the world’s top 100 over the past year, all but one (Jan Choinski, the repatriated former German player, who recently achieved a two-digit ranking for the first time at the age of 30) have experienced a significant injury which has kept them off the court for at least five weeks.
Three have missed at least five months of tennis in that period, and another three are up at about the three-month mark, with the ever-durable Cameron Norrie performing best overall despite the rib problem that forced him to retire from the first round of French Open in May.
The most frustrating cases involve Britain’s two most talented players. On Monday, Emma Raducanu ruled herself out of the upcoming US Open – the sixth major tournament she will have missed in five years – because of the stress fracture in her shin that she developed in the build-up to Wimbledon.
Then, on Tuesday, Draper went out to test his fragile serving arm in Montreal. Despite his insistence to Sky Sports that he was “in the best place” that he’s been in in the last year, many insiders had misgivings about his insistence on playing the tournament.
Draper’s chronic woes spell trouble
This is a man who had pulled out of the previous week’s event in Washington with the latest symptoms of a bone-bruise problem that now dates back 18 months. The idea that his condition had resolved itself in seven days seemed hopelessly optimistic.
Of course, we all wished Draper the best, because he is both a wonderful talent and a likeable man. But there was no great surprise, only deep sadness, when his game disintegrated in the third set of a tough tussle against France’s Térence Atmane.
Draper had been playing excellent tennis, committing only two unforced errors in a masterful second set – but then his tennis was never the problem. The durability of his body is a different question, and when his serve speeds plunged and his shot selection suddenly switched to an assortment of short chips and slices, it was all too evident that the old issues were resurfacing.
At this stage, Draper’s plight is far more concerning than Raducanu’s. Yes, she does have a terrible fitness record, which has restricted her to 158 matches in the five years since she won the 2021 US Open. Iga Swiatek and Aryna Sabalenka have played about twice as many. But at least she has an easily definable injury that showed up on a scan, and which will heal with an adequate amount of rest.
Draper’s elbow sounds considerably more complicated. Yes, scans did show bone bruising on the end of his humerus – the big bone that runs from the elbow to the shoulder – when his initial pain was checked out last summer. But he is evidently not receiving such clear diagnoses anymore, because he keeps trying – and failing – to play tournaments. In the last 18 months, he has moved from the acute injury phase to something more chronic.
In that same Sky Sports interview in Montreal, Draper explained that “it’s important for people to recognise that the injury I have is very complex, it’s very complicated and everyone around me is doing everything we can to help this keep moving along”.
He then added: “It’s also just getting the right load, getting the right intensity… so I can hopefully get to the point where I do make that breakthrough.”
While we may not have access to Draper’s medical records, these quotes suggest that he has reached that grey area where pain is a constant companion, but clear resolutions feel far away.
From what we know, it seems likely that his elbow hurts like the blazes when he tries to play matches, but that he also cannot pinpoint a single reason or a procedure that will resolve the issue. He keeps trying to work harder and harder in training, to reach a point where the elbow is sturdy enough to deal with tournaments, and he keeps feeling as though he is making progress. But you cannot simulate the stress and unpredictability of matchplay on the practice court, and as soon as he goes out on the ATP Tour, the problem flares up again.
There are supporting factors that could have brought us to this pass.
- Professional tennis is more arduous than it has ever been, owing to the ongoing arms race in hitting power and physical fitness as well as the expanded two-week Masters 1000 events.
- Tennis balls are generally accepted to have become heavier – at least, if you believe what the players say – which may have contributed to a rash of arm and shoulder injuries, such as the wrist problem that has kept Carlos Alcaraz off the tour since mid-April. This could be because today’s monstrous hitters would smash lighter balls for winners too easily.
- Draper has always been a ferociously hard worker, to the point where he may sometimes be in danger of overtraining. His early coach, Ryan Jones, was also a tough taskmaster who prioritised high volumes.
- Draper has an unusually hefty frame for a sport in which mobility is even more important than strength. His ATP profile suggests that he weighs about 13 and a half stone, whereas Andy Murray, his coach, used to come in at under 13st despite being about the same 6ft 4in stature.
- Draper is an intense character who wants to beat the best players. In the context of his career ambitions, he has struggled to accept the need to rest this serious injury. As a result, he has made four separate attempts to return to the tour over the past year, when hindsight suggests that he would have been better off taking a more extended break.
Draper’s aggressive game style – which has echoes of another injury-plagued left-hander in Rafael Nadal – is always going to place huge demands on his body. But we should also note that when you are dealing with chronic pain – especially pain which defies conventional medical solutions – there are other, more holistic variables at play.
“As a clinician, you have to understand the person and their whole life to make sense of their pain,” said Richmond Stace, a physio who specialises in these sorts of complex cases. “Because the bulk of dealing with pain is about meeting needs: sometimes simple needs like rest, but sometimes deeper-seated ones like the need to be understood, to be heard, to be taken seriously.
“We can take painkillers,” Stace added, “but pain isn’t asking to be killed. The true cause of pain is a person’s body systems trying to keep them alive and look after their best interests. And in the case of a tennis player, your body systems don’t care that you want to win Wimbledon, or that your world ranking will fall if you don’t play a tournament next week. What we want and what we actually need are two very different things.”
We are moving into deep waters here, which are difficult to explore in the space of a few hundred words. Suffice to say that the intimate workings of our bodies are as mystifying in their own way as the quirks of quantum physics – which, incidentally, have become an obsession for Atmane, Draper’s inquisitive conqueror in Montreal.
Questions about decision making must be raised
In the circumstances, it might be a relief to return to Raducanu, and the clear-cut nature of her stress fracture. The fact that she sustained the injury by playing through what started as a niggle at Queen’s demonstrates that she is tougher than many people might imagine. But it is also true that she keeps lurching from one setback to the next with predictability.
Last year was the best of Raducanu’s career, in terms of her attendance record. She worked her way through 50 matches in a season which began with her unsettling encounter with a stalker in Dubai and finished early, on account of the foot injury which wiped out her Asian swing in the late autumn. Even this, though, was hardly the smoothest of rides.
It is tempting to wonder how Raducanu’s career would have developed without the spotlight that she drew onto herself via that early US Open title. The tour is stressful enough without being cast as a golden child from the age of 18. And the extra attention may have contributed to her varied catalogue of injuries, which mirror a similar crop experienced by Bianca Andreescu, the Canadian who also became a teenage US Open champion in 2019.
Unlike Draper, who can still travel undisturbed on the London Underground, Raducanu finds herself the subject of paparazzi photographs in the daily tabloids. This cannot be beneficial for her cortisol levels. And there are other contrasts we could draw between these two great British hopes, whose careers have both stalled for various reasons.
Draper lives to compete, and his frustration at being denied this basic right was evident in those tears of frustration on Tuesday night. Although Raducanu might be an excellent match-player when she has court-time under her belt, she gives the impression that she enjoys the outcome – when she is winning, anyway – more than the process of playing tournaments itself.
In both cases, though, questions need to be asked about the decision-making behind the scenes. When to play, when to prepare, when to rest. These are important calls that successful players tend to give serious thought to. Admittedly, there may not always be a “correct” answer, but British tennis needs to sharpen up its act. We are fast developing a reputation as the sick man of Europe.
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2026-08-05T18:15:43Z
