From Arthur Ashe to Roland Garros Qualifying: The Long, Painful and Quietly Heroic Comeback of Bianca Andreescu

The Moment That Started It All

Cast your mind back to the evening of 7 September 2019 at Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York City. A 19-year-old Canadian named Bianca Andreescu walked onto the court for the US Open final with the kind of calm self-belief that most professional athletes spend entire careers trying to manufacture. On the other side of the net stood Serena Williams — 23-time Grand Slam champion, living legend, and one of the most decorated athletes in the history of sport. Andreescu won the first set, lost the second, then took the third 6–3 to become the first Canadian, male or female, to win a Grand Slam singles title in the Open Era.

It was one of those sporting moments that feels, in retrospect, like the beginning of a dynasty. The tennis world had a new queen-in-waiting. She was already ranked World No. 4. She had also won Indian Wells that year, defeating four top-20 players, becoming the first wildcard women's singles champion in tournament history and the first 18-year-old to win the event since Serena Williams herself in 1999. Then, weeks later, she hurt her knee at the WTA Finals in Shenzhen. And the unravelling began.

What followed the US Open triumph was not a dynasty. It was something far more complicated, far more human, and — in its own way — far more compelling to watch than any straightforward rise to the top would have been. Bianca Andreescu's story since September 2019 is a story about what sport costs its most gifted practitioners, and about what it takes to come back when the cost has been very, very high.

The Years of Loss: Injuries, Absence and the Long Slide

The statistics of Andreescu's post-US Open career tell their own stark story. After winning the title at Flushing Meadows, she played no tournaments for the rest of 2019 and then skipped the entirety of the 2020 season — a combination of the knee injury, the global pandemic, and the decision not to return to play when the tour resumed. She returned at the 2021 Australian Open, losing in the second round. She reached the final at the Miami Open later that year before losing to Ashleigh Barty due to a right foot injury that forced her to retire from the match.

The injury carousel never fully stopped turning. A shoulder problem kept her out of most of the first quarter of 2022. A knee tear in 2023. A back injury that cost her nine months starting in 2023 and running into 2024. An ankle turned on match point in a first-round win over Barbora Krejčíková at the Canadian Open in July 2025, forcing her withdrawal and keeping her out until September. Each time she returned, she looked like herself for long enough to remind everyone what she was capable of — and then the body failed her again.

By the time 2026 arrived, Andreescu was ranked World No. 228. She was 25 years old. She had won exactly three WTA Tour-level singles titles in her career — all of them in 2019, all of them in a single extraordinary burst of form that now existed on the other side of more than 2,300 days without a title. She had not won an ITF-level singles title since 2019 either. She was, to put it plainly, a former Grand Slam champion who had spent the better part of six years fighting her own body for the right to compete at the level she had once made look effortless.

The Brave Decision: Going Back to Where It Began

The most striking aspect of Andreescu's 2026 comeback story is not that she returned to professional tennis — she has done that multiple times. It is where she chose to return to. At the start of January 2026, Andreescu made a decision that required a particular kind of pride-swallowing courage: she left the WTA Tour and went back to the ITF circuit, the lowest rung of professional women's tennis she had competed on since 2018. It was a world of W35 and W75 events, with total prize purses of around £26,000, filled with rising teenagers and players rebuilding careers. Facilities are more basic. Crowds are smaller. The stakes feel impossibly modest for a player who had earned $3.9 million in prize money at a single Grand Slam tournament.

And yet it worked. In January 2026, Andreescu won 13 of her 14 ITF matches, claiming titles at Bradenton in Florida and then in Vero Beach. The win in Bradenton — a 6-2, 7-5 victory over the 325th-ranked Vivian Wolff in a match disrupted by violent winds and moved indoors — carried a prize of approximately $3,000. It was, by financial measure, less than 0.1% of what she had earned at the 2019 US Open. But it was something the 2019 US Open had not given her since 2019: a title. A win. A completed mission.

Andreescu reflected on the experience with characteristic honesty: "The hunger the women had that I was playing against, every match was so difficult, and I feel like maybe on the WTA Tour, the athletes are maybe a bit more comfortable with certain things." She spoke of being able to test the work she had been doing in practice across real match conditions, to test how her body handled the pressure of playing match after match and tournament after tournament. She described getting her first singles win in six and a half years as something she was "super grateful for."

Her ranking climbed back to World No. 161 by the time she returned to the WTA Tour at the ATX Open in Austin, Texas, in late February, where she received a wildcard. She lost in the first round to Dalma Gálfi. Then, at Charleston in late March, she beat Gálfi in the first round, recovering from a 1-6 opening set to win 6-4, 6-1 in what was her first WTA main-draw win since July 2025. She would go on to defeat Paula Badosa — a former World No. 2 — on her way to the final of the WTA 125 event in Austin. That run, which came alongside a growing commitment to music production and uploading tracks to SoundCloud as a way of disconnecting from the demands of the tour, signalled that something had genuinely changed in both her game and her inner landscape.

The Clay Season: Setbacks, Adaptation and a Moment of Pure Class in Rome

The clay season of 2026 offered a mixed picture, as clay seasons tend to for players rebuilding ranking and rhythm simultaneously. At the WTA 125 event in Oeiras, Portugal — competing during the same week the WTA Tour's elite were battling it out at the Madrid Open — Andreescu, seeded fourth and ranked World No. 127, lost in the first round 6-0, 2-6, 6-4 to France's Fiona Ferro, a player ranked 246th. The scoreline told the familiar Andreescu story in miniature: a disastrous opening set, a strong fight back, and then an inability to sustain the level in the closing stages.

The loss carried direct ranking implications. She was projected to drop at least seven places to around World No. 134, having failed to defend the points she earned with a second-round showing at the 2025 Madrid Open. Her path to WTA 1000-level main draws continued to depend on wildcards and qualifying, rather than direct entry — a humbling reality for a player who had once been ranked fourth in the world.

Rome offered a more encouraging chapter. In the first round of the Internazionali BNL d'Italia, Andreescu defeated Sofia Kenin 6-4, 7-5 in a confident, clean performance that underscored the quality still within her when the physical and mental levers align properly. The win was notable for the calibre of the opponent — Kenin is a 2020 Australian Open champion in her own right. Then in the second round, Andreescu ran into a hot Belinda Bencic, the Swiss twelfth seed who was riding strong form, and lost 6-4, 6-1. It was, again, the Andreescu pattern: she belongs on these courts, she can beat anyone on these courts on a given day, and she is not yet the consistent force that makes the tour's best slightly nervous before they face her.

In Rome, there was also a moment that had nothing to do with scorelines. The Canadian tennis community — and the broader global tennis audience — shared widely a clip of Andreescu consenting to an interview about mental health and the emotional complexity of her comeback. It reflected a maturity in how she speaks about the sport and about herself that was not always present in her early career, and that now seems like one of her most important assets going forward.

Today: Roland Garros Qualifying Opens on Suzanne-Lenglen

On this very morning — Tuesday, 19 May 2026 — Bianca Andreescu walked out onto the Court Suzanne-Lenglen at the Stade Roland-Garros in Paris for the opening round of French Open qualifying. Her opponent was 17-year-old French wildcard Daphnée Mpetshi Perricard, playing in front of her home crowd. Andreescu was seeded 25th in the qualifying draw, and she delivered a composed, authoritative performance, winning 6-3, 6-2 to advance to the second round of qualifying.

But it was what happened after the match that captured the attention of tennis fans across the UK and around the world. As the young French teenager broke down in tears at the net following the defeat — the weight of the occasion, the crowd's expectations, and the sharp end of professional sport combining in a moment of visible heartbreak — Andreescu crossed the court, wrapped the 17-year-old in a warm embrace, and stayed with her for an extended moment of genuine human connection. The scene went viral immediately. Former World No. 1 Mats Wilander, speaking in a broadcast segment, put it succinctly: "This is what tennis is about. Bianca didn't have to do that, but she chose to. It shows maturity and class that will serve her well throughout her career."

The moment resonated precisely because of the context. Andreescu knows better than almost anyone what it is to be a young tennis player facing an emotional breakdown, to be physically and mentally overwhelmed by the demands of a sport that asks everything and forgives very little. She has been that player, in various configurations, repeatedly since 2019. And so when she chose to stop, to cross the net and be present for someone else's pain rather than simply collect her win and move on, it was not merely a nice gesture. It was an act of recognition — one player saying to another, without words: I understand what this costs.

What She Still Has — and What Comes Next

Andreescu needs to win two more qualifying matches to reach the Roland Garros main draw. She next faces a second round qualifying opponent in Paris in a match that will determine whether she makes the main draw of a Grand Slam for the first time in 2026. Should she fail to qualify, her options for the coming weeks include the qualifying draw at Saint-Malo, where she is expected to be seeded second, and the early stages of the European grass-court swing — a surface on which she has historically shown significant ability. Her 2022 Bad Homburg run to the final remains a high-water mark on grass, and the Rosmalen Grass Court Championships in the Netherlands — where she reached the final in 2024 and made the semifinals again — will loom as a key opportunity to accumulate points and restore her confidence on the surface before Wimbledon.

Her current WTA ranking sits at approximately 127, with a 22-9 match record for the 2026 season. In the context of where she started the year — ranked 228, competing on the ITF circuit for $3,000 prizes — that represents a genuine recovery arc. It is not the recovery the world expected after September 2019. It is not linear, and it is not glamorous, and it involves a great many first-set disasters and qualifying draws and wildcard requests and losses to players ranked 246th. But it is real, and it is continuing, and it is being done with a clarity and self-awareness that suggests Bianca Andreescu has finally made a kind of peace with the sport that has both defined and tormented her.

There is also the music. The SoundCloud uploads. The conversations about balance and personal development and not letting results define her identity. A player who once wore her ambition so nakedly that it could tip into anxiety is now building something more durable — a relationship with tennis that might sustain her through the years of grinding that still lie between World No. 127 and the top 50, and between the top 50 and the contender she was in 2019.

Whether she gets back there is genuinely uncertain. The body has been too unpredictable, too willing to produce new problems at the least convenient moments, for certainty about anything. But on the Court Suzanne-Lenglen this morning, with a 17-year-old crying opponent in her arms, Bianca Andreescu looked like someone who knows exactly who she is — and who has no intention of walking away from the sport until it tells her otherwise.

Sources

1. USA Herald — Andreescu's Remarkable Comeback: US Open Champion Battles Back From Injury Plunge to Reclaim Career Momentum (May 19, 2026) — usaherald.com
2. Wikipedia — Bianca Andreescu — en.wikipedia.org
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6. Yardbarker — 'Tennis will leave me one day': Bianca Andreescu turns to music amid 2026 rebuild (April 1, 2026) — yardbarker.com
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9. Tennis Temple — Roland-Garros Qualifying: Dimitrov, Andreescu, Pliskova Headline Packed Tuesday Program — en.tennistemple.com
10. Sentinel Assam — French Open 2026 Qualifying: Dimitrov, Goffin Lead Men's Draw; Andreescu, Pliskova, Badosa Headline Women's Field — sentinelassam.com
11. Tennis Tonic — Bencic improves her ranking prior to competing against Andreescu in Rome — tennistonic.com
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