At the beginning of this week, Eugenie “Genie” Bouchard, the young—she is still 19— and talented Canadian professional tennis player—she hails from Westmount in Montreal, Quebec— was ranked #46 in the world. Just two matches in the Toray Pan Pacific Open tournament in Tokyo, Japan, she is in the top 40 players in the world for the first time in her career. And rising.
After quickly dispatching Stefanie Voegele of Switzerland in two short sets in the first round, Bouchard faced two nights ago a serious mountain to climb in the second round in the person of the highly touted young American player Sloane Stephens.
Now, while Stephens is just one year older than Bouchard, she has considerably more professional tournament experience, and has been already seen—definitely too soon—as stepping into the shoes of the Williams sisters. Anyway, right now she is #13 in the world, and taking the ranking difference and the experience into account, many pundits considered the American as the favorite in this match. They certainly scored a miss on this one.
The previous and only encounter in the professional ranks between them having gone in favor of her opponent, and training and playing with her since age twelve, Bouchard knew the importance of a good start. She went off at it with a lot of moxie and climbed to a 5-0 advantage in the first set. But the American had to sooner or later recoil from this shock and come into her own, and she did that like a house on fire, taking the first set after seven consecutive games, and getting to 5-3 in the second, two points away from winning the match.
Only thing was, Bouchard was not finished. She came back, took the fight to her opponent again and bagged a very tight second set tiebreaker 76(7), before taking the third set much more clearly 63.
Sports By Rob 
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