Mirra Andreeva showed up to tennis in the middle of last season like the new kid at school whose mother or father had just been transferred to the local branch.
One day no one had heard of her, the next she's everything everyone is talking about. That's how it is for Andreeva, who takes on this Australian Open at 16, a week into the online version of her junior year of high school and already complaining about homework. She performs another miracle every other day and then speaks about it in her third language (Russian and French are one and two) with equal levels of sophistication, self-irony, humor and sarcasm, better than many people can in their first language.
The other day, Andreeva defeated Ons Jabeur, the three-time Grand Slam finalist and her female tennis idol, playing near-flawless tennis on her way to a 6-0, 6-2 win at Rod Laver Arena, the same court where she lost the junior final here last year.
On Friday, Andreeva pulled off a miracle of a different kind. She recovered from a 6-1 loss in the first set to Diane Parry to draw evenly, then somehow got out of a 5-1 hole in the third set, saved two match points, stormed 6-5 up and then failed to break serve in the match, but quickly recovered to beat Parry 10-5 in the tiebreaker of the deciding set.
She touched her face and hid a sheepish smile, then began pulling bracelets out of her bag and tossing them into the enthusiastic Australian crowd that had fallen for her charms for the past week.
An hour later, she was back down to earth, with both feet firmly on the ground or as close to it as possible, rocketing into the limelight of the game she loves so much, and unfazed by her successes so far.
“Maybe if I win a slam,” Andreeva said with a wry smile to a handful of adults twice and three times her age. “I still have three games to win and it’s really hard to win seven games in a row.”
Andreeva has a lot in common with other teenage girls, just with a hint of tennis for the habits of youth.
At the end of each day, she turns off the light in her room and has a conversation with herself about what happened.
She watches a lot of videos on her computer and phone, but often it's an old tennis match. She knows the greatest hits of Martina Hingis, the Swiss prodigy whose smooth and powerful baseline game is often compared to hers.
She stares at her heartthrob. He happens to be a 36-year-old married man with four children, a receding hairline and a metal hip named Andy Murray. After her win on Friday, he took to X, formerly Twitter, to praise her mental toughness and suggested that she owes her success to how hard she can be on herself, even if that hasn't served her well in the past. More on that in a moment.
For Andreeva that was everything.
“Honestly, I didn’t really think he would watch a game and then comment after he tweeted,” she said. “I'll try to print it out somehow. I don't know, I'll put it in a frame. I will take it with me everywhere. I might hang it on the wall so I can see it every day.”
On the pitch, Andreeva is a series of beguiling contradictions. She doesn't seem particularly fast, but somehow always has her feet behind the ball. She doesn't seem to swing too hard, but she can shoot the ball off her strings. There was a calm around her in the crucial moments on Friday as Parry panicked, although Andreeva said it didn't feel quite like what it felt like in her brain.
Andreeva made a great comeback to defeat Parry (Robert Prange/Getty Images)
She said she felt pretty confident after beating Parry in the second set. She had won five games in a row, had several breaks of serve and just had to keep doing what she was doing.
Then she lost her own serve, missed her chance to return to serve at 2-0, and before she knew it she was down 5-1. She looked at the scoreboard and realized the absurdity of a game that could end 6-1, 1-6, 6-1, so she made it her mission to win a game so that the final set was at least 6-2 .
When the score was 5-2 she had lost the match point, stormed into the net and thought: “Am I crazy?” I'm going into the net on match point?” But then Parry missed.
With the score at 5-3, she felt her adrenaline rising and she was determined to win. She quickly took two points on Parry's serve, but gave them back on missed returns. Her inner voice told her, “God, okay, this is it.”
The next two “crazy points” were a mix of running and swinging. When she won it, she knew she had the mental advantage, that the energy flowed through her and escaped Parry. Even when she couldn't finish the game at 6-5, she still knew she had come so far back and let Parry get away with it.
“It was like, okay, six-everything, I didn't think that was it,” she said. “I knew I was going to win, but I just have to do everything I can for it.”
Andreeva's ties to the Australian Open are close. As a tennis fan, she enjoys rewatching old matches in her free time and the 2017 final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal is her favorite. The relationship actually began two years before she was born, when her mother Raisa became enthusiastic about the sport when Marat Safin won the men's singles title in 2005. A few years later, she brought Mirra's older sister Ericka, now also a professional, to class, with Mirra in tow.
This was in Krasnoyarsk, a cold city of a million people in Siberia, in the middle of the largest country in the world – not exactly a tennis paradise. When the girls began to have success on the court, Raisa moved them to Sochi on the Black Sea, a far warmer place and the breeding ground of Maria Sharapova, and then to Cannes, France. There they enrolled in a tennis academy. It's still their base. An IMG recruiter found her when she was a scruffy, undersized twelve-year-old and called headquarters.
She burst onto the scene at the Madrid Open last year when, aged just 15, she became one of the youngest players to defeat a top-20 opponent, defeating Beatriz Haddad Maia of Brazil. In the next match she did it again and won against Magda Linette from Poland, who was twice her age.
She won five matches at the French Open, including the qualifying matches, and two at Wimbledon, her first major competition on grass, before her youthful head emerged and doomed her defeats – a ball flung into the crowd in Paris, a racket possibly thrown in Wimbledon That cost them a crucial point. She swore she dropped it and didn't throw it.
At the US Open she met the in-form Coco Gauff in the second round and was clearly beaten in the second round.
She has since parted ways with her coach Jean-Rene Lisnard, the former Monaco professional, and hired a temporary coach, Kirill Krioukov, a Russian who worked with Andreeva and her sister when they were younger.
She tries to balance the academic struggles of high school life without the benefits, a dynamic that doesn't always work out so well. Growing up as a teenage phenom isn't for everyone.
That's not a problem at the moment, not while she's taking over Melbourne Park and heading into the second week of a Grand Slam for the second time in seven months. This life suits her quite well.
“I like being here,” she said, and wasn’t just talking about Australia. “I like traveling all over the world. I’m okay with what’s happening.”
(Top photo: Robert Prange/Getty Images)