One 12 months on from Emma Raducanu stalker hell, tennis nonetheless has a serious drawback coping with crazed followers, writes TAMARA PRENN

Before the start of last year’s Dubai Open, Emma Raducanu‘s 2025 had already seen its fair share of false starts. 

Looking to complete her first full year on tour after bouncing back from a string of surgeries in 2023, the British No 1 had reached the third round at the Australian Open, with wins against two seeded opponents in Ekaterina Alexandrova and Amanda Anisimova, before she was knocked out by world No 2 Iga Swiatek. 

A string of first round exits in Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar followed before Raducanu returned to the UAE for her sixth tournament of the season. 

After an opening round win against Maria Sakkari, there were reasons to be cheerful ahead of facing talented Czech star Karolina Muchova in the second round. 

Instead, her defeat to the 14th seed came with far worse consequences. During the match, Raducanu became visibly distressed after seeing a man in the stands who had displayed ‘fixated behaviour’, including handing a letter to Raducanu outside of the tournament grounds after beating Sakkari. 

The man is thought to have followed Raducanu to four of her tournaments since the start of that year, and was later handed a restraining order. 

For Raducanu, this painful incident would have felt depressingly familiar. A UK-based stalker had previously received a five-year restraining order against the 2021 US Open champion a year after her success at Flushing Meadows. 

More examples of tennis stars feeling threatened have followed in the year following, a terrifying reminder that the issue of stalking and abusive contact both on and off the court in the women’s game is not going away. 

In the immediate aftermath of the incident, Raducanu was offered increased protection at her next major tournament, Indian Wells, in the form of extra security guards. 

But even the additional provisions weren’t enough to stem the player’s wariness, as she noted in her first in-depth interview since Dubai in June. 

‘It was difficult,’ she told BBC Sport. ‘It was emphasised by the fact I didn’t necessarily feel certain or comfortable in my own set-up and team so it just added to the anxious feeling.

‘I’m obviously wary when I go out. I try not to be careless about it because you only realise how much of a problem it is when you’re in that situation and I don’t necessarily want to be in that situation again.

‘Off the court right now, I feel good, I feel pretty settled. I feel like I have good people around me and anything that was negative, I kind of brush it off as much as I can.’

While Raducanu was rebuilding, Swiatek, a former world No 1 and one of the biggest names in the game, was forced to endure threatening circumstances at another Masters tournament.

The Pole saw her preparations for her round-of-32 match against Elise Mertens disturbed when a 40-year-old man launched a ‘primitive’ and ‘vulgar’ attack at her. 

In Swiatek’s case, it was a man known to the star who perpetrated the attack, shouting jibes about her mother and her psychologist Daria Abramowicz as she carried out her training drills. 

Only a handful of venues on the tour have private practice courts for the players, like Aorangi Park at Wimbledon. Almost everywhere else, practice sessions are open to ticket holders – another opportunity to catch your favourite player in action.

Like Raducanu, Swiatek was given additional security after her team reported the incident to tournament directors and the WTA. A security guard stood in her box and another accompanied her during her on-court interview. 

But while beefed-up security is available for players who have reason to feel threatened, others have not been as fortunate. 

At Wimbledon, Kazakh star Yulia Putintseva was reduced to tears and called for security to remove a fan she perceived as ‘crazy’ and ‘dangerous’ as she toiled to a 6-0, 6-0 defeat to Amanda Anisimova. 

The man in question is thought to have been targeting Russian players over perceived support of the war in Ukraine. Putintseva revealed post-match that she was simply relieved that ‘no one was hurt’ and that unpleasant interactions remain disturbingly commonplace on tour. 

‘It was just an idiot, like saying something, and I was not afraid,’ Putintseva said, blaming her tears largely on a disappointing performance on the court.

‘But I was feeling uncomfortable, because there is too many idiots right now in the world.’

Wimbledon also served as a grim reminder of Raducanu’s own issues with fixated persons. The man given the restraining order in Dubai attempted to get tickets to the Championships, despite having been banned from attending events on the tour. 

The All England Club’s security system identified his name and blocked his attempt to enter the public ballot for tickets. 

News of his attempt to gain entry into SW19 broke just under two weeks before the start of the tournament while Raducanu was preparing for her biggest tournament of the year. 

‘Wimbledon and everyone did an amazing job,’ Raducanu said a week later. ‘I got a notification, the police contacted me, and told me everything was going to be OK. 

‘I know that I am not the first athlete to go through this, and I probably won’t be the last – not just as an athlete, but females in general’. 

Less than three months later, however, another female star was not as lucky.

At the US Open, Muchova was left distressed by a man she described as her ex-boyfriend appearing in the stands during her second round match against Sorana Cirstea. 

The Czech star became visibly agitated after noticing him, and appeared to wipe tears from her eyes as she attempted to pull herself together to see out the match. 

After winning the match, Muchova explained: ‘Opposite my bench, my ex-boyfriend sat down. 

‘He sometimes shows up at places where he shouldn’t be. That startled me a bit. I told him to leave, but he didn’t, but later he did go. It was hard to focus in that moment.’ 

Muchova is not thought to have requested that her ex-partner be blacklisted by the United States Tennis Association or the WTA, which would have denied him entry. 

But the incident underlines the threat tennis players face when they step onto court. Tennis stars, unlike other sportspeople, have a level of closeness to their crowd that allows for greater scrutiny. Spectators, particularly unwelcome ones, don’t go unnoticed in the stands.

Then there’s abuse on social media, where stars are encouraged to spend copious amounts of time cultivating their brand. As Coco Gauff’s seemingly private unravelling in the bowels of Rod Laver Arena at the Australian Open shows, tennis’ social media presence has left few places for players to hide from its constant appetite. 

While staying offline is not an option, there are few things to recommend being online, with the ITF and WTA in June publishing an inaugural 2024 season report tracking the abuse of tennis players across different platforms. 40 per cent of this stems from gamblers, who have placed bets on their matches. 

Using data from Signify Group’s Threat Matrix service between January and December, the report confirmed that close to 8,000 posts and comments from 4,200 could be deemed ‘abusive, violent, or threatening’. 

The worst accounts are subsequently flagged to Tour events, prompting bans, while for 15 separate instances, the threat level was elevated, with the FBI involved in three cases deemed particularly severe. 

Predictably, WTA players bear the brunt of the abusive posts – although gamblers attacking players do target ATP stars – with five women’s stars receiving over a quarter (26 per cent) of all the abuse tracked. 

Rising star Eva Lys – who has built a personable social media presence since breaking into the top 50 last year – detailed her experience with violent abuse from bettors in an interview with Die Welt in November, and how accounts had sent her messages insulting her family, death threats, and even said ‘in detail how (she would be) raped’. 

‘After every defeat,’ Lys confirmed, after previously sharing some of the messages on her social media account. ‘A thousand times the hate straight into my inbox. Without exception. 

‘Some are particularly brazen. If a match is close, goes to a third set, and I’m behind, I later find nasty messages that must have been written at that moment. If I then win, the same guy writes that I should forget the previous message, that he’s sorry. He’s now won 5,000 euros. 

‘Some people write that they’ll find me and then do this or that to me. That makes me uneasy. I’ve also recently had to deal with stalkers who got hold of the addresses of training facilities, hotels, and even room numbers. 

‘Was it related to lost bets? I don’t know. They were clearly obsessed with me. That crossed all boundaries. 

‘Together with the association, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), we’ve made sure to at least keep these people away from the tournaments and the courts. But even these security measures have their limits.’ 

Attempts to improve safety online and on-court are being made. Lys took time to laud an innovation at last year’s French Open which allowed players to filter comments through AI, for example. And the WTA remains committed to making player safety their ‘top priority’, as the organisation stressed in June. 

But in the meantime, what is left to do for players, it seems, is to live with the unease as associations and the Tour work on improving protections of player welfare.

By December, Raducanu shared, she had moved on from the incident in Dubai, helped in part by an extended off-season spent staying in her childhood bedroom in Bromley. 

‘I have my hood up, or whatever, but they’re just so focused and absorbed in their own world,’ Raducanu said of travelling with the commuters in and out of central London each day. 

‘It’s all so crazy. It’s like everyone’s on a mission. You have to get the elbows out, just to get through.

‘If people recognise me, if people see me, and they want to come up to me, then that’s great, but I don’t necessarily feel like I’m hiding from anything any more.’