THERE WAS SO much that Bianca Andreescu didn’t know when she stunned the world and won the US Open in 2019.
She was 19, playing in her first full year on the WTA Tour, and competing in just the fourth Grand Slam main draw of her career. Andreescu had captured the titles at Indian Wells and the Canadian Open earlier that season, but few expected her to triumph in New York. Even fewer believed she could defeat Serena Williams in the final.
But she didn’t know that.
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With a 6-3, 7-5 upset victory over one of the sport’s greatest players of all time, Andreescu became the first Canadian to win a Grand Slam singles title. She also emerged as a global star, captivating fans with her fearless play, thoughtful interviews, joyful energy, and a toy poodle named Coco who frequently appeared in her player box.
Andreescu, who rose to a top-five ranking after the win, was excited about the future and eager to achieve more success, which felt almost inevitable at the time. She certainly didn’t foresee the series of injuries that would follow, or the mental struggles that would make her contemplate whether she could continue playing the sport she loved.
Seven years after her unforgettable triumph at the US Open, Andreescu, now 26 and ranked No. 186, is back at the tournament competing in the qualifying event. It’s an unusual position for a former champion. She will need to win three matches, beginning Monday against Eva Vedder, to reach the main draw. But after everything she has endured, she is more motivated than ever and confident in what she can achieve.
“Of course there’s always going to be this narrative about 2019 until I accomplish something like that again,” Andreescu told ESPN last week. “But always being asked about 2019 made me naturally compare myself to the 19-year-old version of myself constantly, and now I’m just telling myself, ‘Look B, you did win the US Open, it’s possible to do it again.’
“But I don’t need to prove that I can do it; it has to come from me. It’s been difficult, and at times I was doing it for the media, doing it for whatever, but now it’s for myself and my future family too. I want my kids to be inspired by me as well. Even if I don’t accomplish it, at least I didn’t give up and I kept trying for the thing that I love the most. As cliché as that sounds, that’s the truth.”
ANDREESCU WAS EVERYWHERE after her win in 2019. “She the North,” a play on the then-newly crowned NBA champion Toronto Raptors’ “We the North” slogan, became her de facto tagline, and a celebratory rally in her hometown of Mississauga drew an estimated 10,000 fans. By year’s end, she had received the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s top athlete, male or female, and was named the WTA’s Newcomer of the Year.
But the celebration was short-lived. A knee injury prevented her from playing in the next major, the 2020 Australian Open, and then the COVID-19 pandemic canceled her title defenses at Indian Wells and the Canadian Open. While the tour resumed in time for the US Open that August, Andreescu withdrew, explaining, “unforeseen challenges, including the COVID pandemic, have compromised my ability to prepare and compete to the degree necessary to play at my highest level.”
The Australian Open in 2021 marked her first major since winning the US Open — more than 15 months later. She lost in the second round. A positive COVID-19 test derailed much of her clay-court season. Her fourth-round finish at the US Open later that year remains her best Grand Slam result since 2019. Injuries prevented her from playing in several other majors, including the 2023 US Open and 2024 Australian Open, during a nine-month layoff due to a stress fracture in her back, or from being at her best at others. With her ranking having plummeted, she has needed to play in major qualifying draws for the past two seasons.
The injuries, and the frequent forced breaks, have taken a mental toll. She missed the start of the 2022 season for what she described as a mental health break.
“I was just not happy,” Andreescu said. “And I’m like, ‘Shouldn’t what I be doing for a living make me happy?’ It was just as simple as that. When you’re in the grind and you’re going to tournament after tournament, it’s hard to really sit down and think about these things because you’re always on the move. But I just caught myself in a pattern where I had never cried so much. I just wasn’t happy.
“Of course, there were some things in my personal life too that weren’t helping, but I’m like, tennis has always brought me joy. No matter what was going on, tennis was my happy place. What changed? What happened?”
That basic question began a quest for answers, combined with an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Traveling “without a tennis racket” helped her journey of self-discovery. While her peers were playing at the Australian Open in 2022, she was attending a meditation retreat in Costa Rica. She has been to several more since. She began studying psychology through the WTA’s partnership with Indiana University East, and found that she loves the “esoteric spiritual side of life.” Today, there is perhaps nothing that gets Andreescu more excited than past-life regression therapy.
“Oh my gosh, I love talking about this,” she said. “It’s so interesting. We might be talking for two hours.”
During a past-life regression therapy session, the subject is placed in a hypnotic, trance-like state but remains fully conscious. The leader then guides the subject to recover memories and experiences from previous incarnations. Andreescu said it can help explain complex relationships or even injuries, and that she has been able to discover a handful of past lives.
“So in one of my past lives, I got shot in the shoulder with an arrow,” Andreescu said, recalling one session with her hypnotherapist Julie Lambert. “I was a soldier in a war in the 1500s or something like that. And that could be one of the reasons why I continuously have shoulder pain.”
Andreescu knows it’s not for everyone and said this is her first time speaking publicly about it. And while some might be skeptical about such a practice — or in her words, might say, “What the f— is she talking about?” — Andreescu wants to share what has helped her.
“It’s intense, and it has opened a whole other can of worms, and it made me see life very differently,” Andreescu said.
Her coach, Dusan Vemic, believes that willingness to learn only helps her on the tennis court too.
“She’s an apprentice of life,” Vemic told ESPN. “She’s interested in so many things outside of tennis, and she’s open to grow and learn more about herself and push the boundaries of what she’s capable of. It takes a lot of courage to be like that, to be open to failures or to testing yourself.”
Andreescu said she has found some clarity about her struggles, and now understands that she fell in love with tennis as a game — something she played just for the joy of it — but it changed once it became a job, with overwhelming expectations and pressure.
Having experienced the sport’s pinnacle at 19 didn’t make it easier. In fact, it completely changed her psyche overnight, and she might not have been ready for it. The prolonged breaks only made it harder. But when she returned in 2022, she brought a fresh perspective and new goals that have continued to evolve with every obstacle.
While she used manifestation and visualization techniques earlier in her career, she has adapted those practices to suit where she is now.
“Manifestation for me back then to what it is now is totally different,” Andreescu explained. “Before I was thinking of the outcome, and now it’s about the process to achieving those goals. Of course, subconsciously I know what I want, but I don’t always have to be thinking, ‘I want to be No. 1, I want to win another Grand Slam.’ Instead it’s like, how do I get there? What are the smaller things, like how can I stay healthy, that I need to do?”
ANDREESCU HAD AN emergency appendectomy at the start of 2025 — and then a devastating ankle injury, cruelly sustained during a match at the Canadian Open in August, hampered the rest of her year. But during one of her involuntary breaks, a mutual friend suggested Vemic as a potential coach. They met for coffee and immediately recognized a shared philosophy on the sport. They started working together in September.
With her ranking at No. 228 at the start of 2026, and having been unable to sustain any match rhythm for what felt like an eternity, Vemic proposed an unorthodox plan. Instead of “flying all over the world” to play in qualifying at the Australian Open, he suggested she play in a number of low-level ITF events in Florida, where they had been based during preseason training. While Grand Slam champions are a rarity at such tournaments, Vemic said Andreescu showed no signs of ego and quickly agreed. Andreescu said she simply wanted to “get as many matches as possible” and see how her body would hold up physically.
“That had been such a big question mark all these years,” she added.
While not exactly glamorous, and with dozens of fans instead of thousands in attendance, Andreescu’s bold choice paid off. In her first event, the W35 in Bradenton, Florida, in January, Andreescu took home a paycheck of $3,000 (before taxes) but won her first title — at any level — since the US Open in 2019. She won the W75 event in Vero Beach, Florida, just two weeks later.
“I got more matches in three weeks than I did in four months last year,” Andreescu said. “It was a beautiful experience. I mean, the level there is super tough … And it was also a great learning experience for me because I used to play those tournaments obviously before being on the WTA Tour. So it was kind of like a full-circle moment to kind of go back there and to know that yeah, these tournaments are great, but what we train for is to play at WTA events. So it gave me extra motivation in that sense to want to be back at the top.”
She has played primarily WTA tournaments since. Although the results haven’t been as successful, there have been some incredible moments and memorable results, as well as the once almost-improbable silver lining that she has remained healthy throughout.
In June, Andreescu went viral as she cried on court after advancing to the main draw at Wimbledon by winning three qualifying matches. It marked her first main draw appearance at a Grand Slam in nearly two years, and she said she remained on court in a tearful mixture of awe and celebration for what she guessed to be seven or eight minutes before the tournament kindly asked if she could do her television interview.
“It was just a feeling of relief for not giving up, because there were many moments where I wanted to give up and hang my tennis racket because I didn’t believe that I could continue in this sport,” Andreescu explained. “And it was a relief as well because it was like a sign that all my hard work and effort is paying off, because at the end of the day, we don’t train to lose, we train to win.”
Days later, Andreescu lost a first-round thriller 7-6 (3), 7-6 (6) to Zhang Shuai, but she still considered it a successful trip, and her happiness from that moment is still evident when she speaks about it.
The summer hard-court season has been more challenging. Despite holding a 5-2 lead in the opening set of her first-round match against Nikola Bartunkova, Andreescu, who had received a wild card, lost the set and then the match 7-5, 6-4. She was despondent when speaking to reporters — “I wish I had the answers,” she said — and then was handed another frustrating loss in qualifying at Cincinnati after multiple rain delays. But, as she pointed out, there was a bright side, as the early exit gave her an extra training week at home to prepare for the US Open.
Now, seven years later, Andreescu is back at the Slam that made her a household name. She’s no longer the wide-eyed 19-year-old, and her expectations for herself and her definition of success have changed drastically. But she remains focused on returning to the main draw and confident in her abilities when at her best. Vemic, a former player who has also coached 24-time major champion Novak Djokovic, believes she is on the cusp of another breakthrough. “I’ve seen enough tennis athletes that I know when there is quality on many, many different levels, and she 100% has it,” Vemic said. “She possesses that and she’s determined, she’s focused. And in my mind, it’s just a matter of time.”
When asked what she would want fans to know about her journey and how she has changed as a person since that life-changing moment in 2019, Andreescu paused for a moment before answering.
“The more I go through life, the more I’m like, ‘Oh wow,’ and I realize there’s still so much I don’t know,” Andreescu said. “There’s still so much to learn and so much to experience, and with that I’ve tried to be more patient with myself and not be so hard on myself … But the one thing that has kind of stuck with me throughout is the inspiration I want to be for others and that I still love this sport.
“And now it’s all about appreciation. I have so much love for everybody that still supports me and all the people that I have in my life. I just appreciate them so much more now.”
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