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AHEAD OF SCHEDULE
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ictoria Mboko was nervous ahead of her first match at the French Open, but she knew it must be natural to feel jitters ahead of her Grand Slam debut. She’d been training basically her whole life for a moment like it, after all. Vicky, as she’s known, wants to win every match she plays, but she did not have high expectations heading into Roland Garros, mostly because her first time playing in the main draw of a WTA tournament had come just two months earlier. She was ranked 120th in the world. If she won a match or two in the qualifying round of the Grand Slam, Mboko figured she’d be content.
The 18-year-old from Burlington, Ont., accomplished that goal and then some, winning three straight qualifying matches, none of them requiring a third set. And once she’d played her way into the French Open’s main draw, her perspective shifted: “Oh, let’s see how long I can do this for,” she thought to herself. By “this” she meant “win.”
Mboko went on to upset the world Nos. 45 and 59 in Lulu Sun and Eva Lys, both in straight sets. It took world No. 7 and reigning Olympic champion Qinwen Zheng to eliminate the young Canadian in the third round. Mboko followed up that performance with her Wimbledon debut, where she recorded her biggest win yet, upsetting world No. 29 Magdalena Frech before bowing out in the second round.
Those highlights are part of a season that has seen Mboko surge up the world rankings from 352nd to as high as 86th in an eight-month span, making her just the third teenager to earn a top-100 ranking this year, thanks to regularly punching above her weight. She beat her fifth top 50-ranked player earlier this week in Washington, and now she’s in Montreal to play in front of a home crowd, one of a record-number eight Canadians in the National Bank Open field. That group includes household names like Leylah Fernandez, Bianca Andreescu and Eugenie Bouchard, who’s set to retire following the tournament, but it’s Mboko, the teenager with braces on her teeth, who’s riding the hottest streak of any Canadian.
Time will tell whether she can add to her number of upsets in Montreal, but if you ask Tennis Canada’s Noelle van Lottum, who’s known Mboko since her junior playing days, one thing is certain: “She will give it everything. She’s a fighter on the court.” That heart has landed Mboko on the biggest stages in her sport earlier then she imagined. And now that Vicky is here, look out.
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boko has been aware of her own competitive fire for as long as she can remember. She was three years old when she first started playing tennis, a decision she calls “fate” since her three older siblings played and she wanted to do whatever they did. And even as a toddler she was convinced she could beat her sister, Gracia, then 13, in a match.
“I always felt like I was good, from the moment I started — even though I probably wasn’t,” Mboko told Sportsnet last week, between matches at the Mubadala Citi DC Open, where she cracked the second round. The youngest Mboko kid wanted to play with Gracia and her brothers, Kevin and David, who were then 12 and 10, respectively, but they’d tell her: “No, you’re too little,” so she’d hit with her dad instead. “But I think I always felt like I was better than my sister and I wanted to beat her, so in that sense, I thought I was good,” Mboko says.
By then, she and her family were living just west of Toronto, having relocated from North Carolina, where she was born. Mboko says she’s “90-per cent sure” her family moved to Canada for tennis, so that her three siblings could attend an academy called Players Edge in Toronto’s north end. Both Gracia and Kevin went on to NCAA careers, and Mboko spent a lot of time at the academy herself. “I think overall I kind of forced my dad to put me in more lessons and I made a lot of friends along the way, too,” she explains. “I was always on the tennis court and at the academy all day.”
The move to the Toronto area wasn’t her family’s first. Her dad, Cyprien Mboko, and mom, Godee Kitadi Muhini fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the site of ongoing war, political strife and humanitarian crises, to ensure a better life for their family. “They’re fighters, they’re survivors,” says van Lottum, who’s known the family for more than five years. “That gives also the strength in Vic, she has that in her.”
The Mbokos are a close-knit unit. While Gracia, Kevin and David weren’t too keen on playing tennis with their younger sister when she was three or four or five, these days you’ll find at least one of her family members at each of her matches. Gracia was at Wimbledon last month and provided “immense support,” van Lottum says. Cyprien often sits courtside, and Karl Hale, the NBO’s long-time tournament director, believes Mboko’s dad is different from most tennis parents he’s seen over the years. “He’s very calm, he’s very subdued, and very observant,” Hale says, noting Mboko’s siblings and parents are with her every step of the way. “It’s a testament to how a family supports a talented young girl to success.”
Mboko’s talent was clear from a young age. She signed with IMG at 12, moving to Florida to train around that time, and cracked the 2022 girls’ junior Wimbledon singles semifinal at 15, before losing to the eventual winner. But for much of her junior career, Mboko wasn’t able to find a rhythm and consistently improve due to a string of knee injuries she calls a “chronic, recurring thing.” Unable to play a regular slate of tournaments or train consistently, her development slowed for a couple years.
Despite those struggles, though, she managed to stay positive. “I never really found myself doubting myself, because I knew what I was able to do,” she says.
Mboko spent last season in Belgium training with top-end coaches at the Justine Henin Academy, but she had a tough year and fell in world rankings from 323 to 350. She eventually contacted van Lottum at Tennis Canada to see about returning home to work with a team in Toronto, and moved back in November of 2024. “She was missing her family, missing her friends, and she didn’t feel happy,” van Lottum says.
Van Lottum put together a team around Mboko that includes herself and Nathalie Tauziat, a former world No. 3 turned coach, plus strength and fitness professionals. And it wasn’t long before she started to see a change in Mboko’s play, which she attributes in large part to Mboko being home. “She’s very strong, she’s very powerful, and she now has that belief in herself,” the coach says. “With her family around her, that gives her the strength and the support around her to go out there and believe that she can beat anybody.”
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he waves Mboko’s made in pro tennis started once this season began and have been building ever since. She won 22 straight matches — all in straight sets — on the International Tennis Federation (ITF) Challenger Tour, and four straight titles. No Canadian had put together that many consecutive wins since the ITF began tracking such records in 1994. Mboko then won a fifth Challenger title before receiving a wildcard invite to the WTA event in Miami, where she earned her first singles main draw WTA win in three sets over Camila Osorio, the first top-100-ranked player she beat.
She ultimately dropped a three-setter in a tiebreak to world No. 10, Paula Badosa, who was blown away by the young Canadian. “I have to give credit to her — what a player, what a player, honestly,” Badosa told the Tennis Channel after the match. “I felt she was playing unbelievable tennis, very good potential, fearless and I had no other option but to fight until the end.”
Amidst all the praise, Badosa, the former world No. 2, also admitted she “was shocked” by Mboko, which is fair, given the rapid ascent the Canadian has been on. Van Lottum points out Mboko’s rise puts her in distinct company over the last couple of a seasons: only Amanda Anisimova and Lois Boisson have improved their ranking more significantly in such a short period. “She’s in the top three in the world [in that department],” van Lottum says. “It is an exception. It’s immense how well she did this year.”
Immense and a little shocking; Mboko doesn’t disagree with either assessment. “One way I would describe the season that I’m having is very sudden,” she says. “A lot has happened, honestly, in the past couple of months, and although I’m very grateful to have so many experiences on the WTA Tour, it feels a lot different than what I’m used to. But I mean, I feel pretty content with where I am right now, and I plan to keep moving forward for the rest of the season.”
Mboko considers her success “kind of unexpected,” but only due to the timing. “Of course, at some point in my life I believed in myself that I was going to get here, but I didn’t know it was going to be so soon,” she says.
Mboko turns 19 next month, and the focus for her team is to ensure she can keep developing and stay injury-free. Her biggest recent challenge came after the grass season, as she dealt with inflammation in her knees due to the surface and aggressive play. “It’s fine now and she’s healthy, but we have to make sure that we manage that well,” van Lottum says, pointing out the challenge many of this country’s top players have had in staying healthy. “In the past, there’s been players that have been doing well for one year and then afterwards they stop or they don’t play anymore, so what is very important is that she’s healthy, happy, no burnout, and that she is playing for many, many years.”
The result of Mboko staying healthy this season is an incredible 45-8 record. “When I started this year, I felt pretty healthy with my body,” she says, pointing to the strength work she’s been doing on her legs, which has paid off all over the court. “Mentally, I feel pretty good to compete. So, I think I just went out there and I had nothing to lose.”
The Canadian boasts a big and powerful game. Says van Lottum: “She hits the ball very, very hard.”
Mboko’s self-assessment is as follows: “I mean, I like every aspect of my game, but I’d say I really like my serve and my forehand. I’d say they’re my two most powerful shots. Those are the kind of shots that can get me a lot of free points.”
Hale, the tournament director, points to Mboko’s ability to move around the court as another top asset. “She has everything to be a top player,” he says. “She’s so young, she’s only going to get stronger, better, smarter.”
Van Lottum says “there is no limit” to Mboko’s potential. “She has everything in her to succeed and to perform against the best,” the coach says. “And I mean, she’s going to be 19 next month. Her future is in front of her.”
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f all the big stages she’s found herself on this season, Mboko’s favourite came back in April in Tokyo when she made her Billie Jean King Cup debut, going 2-0 for Canada. “That was my first ever experience playing for the country and at a professional level, so I think that was really, really exciting, and I was really happy to have experienced that,” she says.
“Her fight, her grit, her resilience was incredible,” van Lottum adds, pointing to Mboko’s second match, in which she lost the second set after earning match point and trailed in the third before fighting back to win a nearly three-hour battle against Japan’s Ena Shibahara, 6-4, 6-7, 7-5. “She just doesn’t want to lose, she wants to win and she’s so proud to play for her country. It was nice to see how she dealt with that,” van Lottum says. “It’s great for tennis, great for Canada to have her playing for us.”
Mboko is about to represent Canada in Canada, as a wild-card entry at her national tournament. The top seed in Montreal is world No. 2 Coco Gauff. Last month in Rome, Mboko played the two-time Grand Slam winner for the first time and forced Gauff to three sets after winning the opener 6-3.
Mboko grew up watching and attending the tournament in Toronto. “For me to play at this level when I was always going to this tournament really young is just really exciting,” she says. Her fondest memories are of seeing the player she calls “my No. 1 idol,” Serena Williams, who dominated in Toronto, winning the NBO title three times. “I like that she was really powerful. And, I mean, at the time, she was also kind of winning everything, so I had no choice but to like her,” Mboko says. “I really loved her game and she just had such a big aura when you saw her, so I think I always wanted to kind of resemble my game like hers.”
Mboko isn’t the type to set many goals for herself. She points to achieving a high ranking and winning a Grand Slam as obvious aims shared by every elite tennis player, but her approach to achieving them is evidence of her maturity. “I like to really take things slowly, and I like to let things happen the way they do,” she says. “A couple of months ago, I would have never thought that I would be here. So everything can happen so fast, whether it’s really good or whether it is not as good as you would like it to be. But I think for the rest of the season I want to just be happy and compete the best I can. I just [want] everything around me to be a good environment and obviously being healthy is really important for me, so I think that those are my goals.”
Mboko played in the NBO for the first time back in 2022, when she was 15 years old and ranked 521st in the world. She lost in the first qualifying round in three sets to American Claire Liu, who was then ranked 81st in the world.
This time around, in Montreal, she’s set to showcase her grit and game on home turf for the first time since she started making big waves. Mboko is approaching the NBO, and the tournaments that follow, the same way she did the French Open, content to take it a match at a time and see what happens.
“I just want to go out there and put on a good performance and a good show, you know?” she says. “Whether I win or lose, it’s as long as I perform well or give a good match for the fans.”
As it’s turned out, Mboko has managed to do all “this” earlier and for longer than she or anyone else imagined. And alongside her family in the stands, Canadian tennis fans will be rooting for her to keep it up.
Tim Clayton/Getty Images; Robert Prange/Getty Images; Alfredo Falcone/LaPresse via AP; Christophe Ena/AP Photo