Not to understand the hate for Emma Raducanu?

[Rococococo]

I really don’t get why she’s the object of so much derision? Ok she hasn’t achieved much since she won the US open and yes, a lot of the media hype WAS insane. But that wasn’t her fault and the mockery and schadenfreude from people online (Twitter, forums, news site comments etc) feels over the top.

Even her achievement in winning the US open is constantly belittled as an undeserved fluke. Maybe that’s true, I’m not a tennis expert so don’t have a clue. But I’m shocked by the glee so many people seem to be taking in her losses. It’s like she’s become a universal object of scorn.

There’s just something really unpleasant about it. It feels like it goes beyond the bit of negativity that all people in the public eye get at times. AIBU?

@GrouchyKiwi if anything, she seems to get bigged up at Emma’s expense. I’ve seen so many comments about how she had a much harder draw in the US open and how she was unfairly put off in the final by Emma’s medical timeout 🙄

I remember a lot of that from the time, Rococococo.

The British public loves doing this to sportspeople. Jo Konta, Heather Watson, Andy Murray, Lewis Hamilton, they all get it.

@starlingdarling Wow

@bellebeautifu1

My adult DD and DH are tennis junkies, DD's on a tennis forum and apparantly there is a lot of hate for her on there so you do have a point OP.

You would think the British public would be grateful for a female player to win a slam, on the woman's side we are the worst grand slam nation in terms of slams won in recent decades, even the Aussies have done better than us despite their much smaller population.

Yes have seen some horrid comments on tennis pages.

Sadly it's quite typical of the attitude of build them up while they are winning and knock them down when they are not.

Her run in the us open was unprecedented and made for tennis gold. But then people seemed to forget that it's a teenager who is only breaking through.

It's a shame as she comes across as such a lovely woman who is training hard.

sportsleo.com/news/2022/02/5-most-abused-tennis-players-in-2021/

Thanks for the link @starlingdarling

So according to those stats, 60% of the most abused tennis players in 2021 were women of colour. In a mainly white sport 😬 Not a great look.

[quote starlingdarling]sportsleo.com/news/2022/02/5-most-abused-tennis-players-in-2021/[/quote]

So three out of the five are black and mixed race women, who are all vocal on their mental health and how abuse affects it. They got 11k - 32k vile tweets for simply completing at their chosen sport.

Andy Murray, who again is a vocal advocate for mental health, equality and has stuck up for Serena (and others) more times than I care to count gets 11k vile tweets

Then Novak, who lied time and time again and doctored official documents to cheat the system to gain entry into the Australian Open and has been proven to have acted illegally, received 7k abusive tweets.

Great!

*competed 🤦🏽‍♀️

@GrouchyKiwi yes I noticed that just this morning. It's definitely out there and as you say from supposed tennis fans.

@koperteapot I think Nishkin was posting that as an example of the shittiness.

Thank you @Rococococo

I thought that was obvious to be honest!

I'm not convinced there's a racist element, I think it's more that people who don't follow the sport saw her win the US Open and assumed she was immediately going to become another Serena, winning everything. And when she didn't, some people got nasty and started saying she was rubbish, when in fact she's still very young and inexperienced and learning about life as a professional tennis player.

TruthieRuthie not a single word of the post you've highlighted mentions race.

However, I absolutely do think that race plays a massive factor in the abuse she gets. Racism is rife in Britain and British Sport, denying it doesn't mean it's not true.
Like I said in my very first post, she plays for Britain but she was born in Canada to Chinese and Romanian parents and I saw an awful lot of racial slurs and sneers that she "couldn't be British" in the comments under many a social media post that I looked at last summer. They delete them but it's still disgusting. I stay off Twitter because it's just a cesspit.

Emma Radacanu spent more of her childhood in the Uk than Boris Johnson.

And although not wanting to be Prime Minister, along with at least 90% of the population could do a better job of it.

That's right.

It doesn't count, in terms of how the OP phrased her initial post.
The OP specifically referred to comments on Twitter, forums and comments on news sites - why on earth wouldn’t comments on a news site ‘count’?

Similar comments to those on the Mail are easily found on Facebook and Twitter.

I don’t think it’s a particularly unusual level of negativity - a lot of English sports stars get similar treatment, but it’s somewhat surprising how quickly it’s happened with Raducanu, who’s still at the outset of her career.

I thought the same @EyePeeEh

The only reason I didn't take screenshots from Twitter is that it's more time consuming than the easy target of the daily Mail which (to me) is essentially a concentrated version of the worst of Twitter. As it happens, I backed it up with an article about the 5 tennis players receiving the most Twitter abuse in 2021. For an 18 year old newbie to the sport, she's received an awful lot of hate. OP later mentioned the gleeful posts about her losing and I agree, those are the worst to me. Those haven't actually been picked up by that survey which is only looking at overtly abusive tweets. The fact that she is number 4 in the world for abuse surely proves the OP hasn't made this up as so many PPs suggest.

The bizarre thing is that Raducanu hasn't done anything wrong. You could argue that Djokovic, Osaka and Serena have all been poor and ungracious losers at times (though obviously no one deserves hate). But Raducanu hasn't done anything like that at all, she's been honest, pleasant, hard-working… the only thing she has done 'wrong' is not win as much as people would like. I'm sure she's as disappointed as anyone else about that, probably more so! It's so weird not to like her.