At a table on the seafront, a vanilla milkshake in hand, Varvara Gracheva frantically searches for a photo of her dogs in her phone. She ends up proudly showing a Parson Russell terrier in the company of a Yorkshire. “I have lots of photos of my friends’ animals but very few of my own”, laughs this animal friend, who also has a parrot. It must be said that the 23-year-old tennis player does not often have the opportunity to see them. The latter are in Joukovski, a small Russian town located 40 kilometers south-east of Moscow. However, since 2017, she has lived in France and rarely returns to her native country.
A distance yet far from weighing him down. “I love my life here, it feels like home”she slipped World, who met her in Mandelieu-la-Napoule (Alpes-Maritimes) a few days before her departure for the American tour, which began on July 31 in Washington DC and will end with the US Open. Like at home to the point of asking for her naturalization, obtained on May 25 and of which she was notified ten days later. If her application for naturalization was made well before the war in Ukraine, instructions had been given not to discuss with her the invasion of the country by Russia.
In New York, where she enters the running on Monday August 28 against the American Taylor Townsend (132ᵉ world) at 5 p.m. (Paris time), Varvara Gracheva (40ᵉ) will play her second Major as a Frenchwoman, after her big first at Wimbledon… of which she has not kept an imperishable memory. “My first round was postponed because of the rain, I couldn’t wait any longer. I had completely forgotten that it was my first Grand Slam as a Frenchwoman! »she says.
“Here, it’s more cool and welcoming”
It was at the age of 3 that “Varya”, his nickname, hit his first balls. His mother, a tennis teacher, taught him “to do things well, with quality and determination”. At the dawn of her debut on the junior circuit, around 13-14 years old, she left the family cocoon, the capricious weather and the insufficient infrastructures of Russia to try the adventure in Europe. ” Pretty much everywhere “ but “always with the same coach”his then compatriot Nina Bratchikova, former world top 100.
Until 2017 when her mother, on the advice of a friend, convinced her to continue her training at the Elite Tennis Center (ETC) of the Cannes Garden Tennis Club (Alpes-Maritimes). There, a certain Daniil Medvedev, also straight from Moscow, trains. But the young woman is dragging her feet. “I didn’t want to leave my old coach, she explains. At the beginning, it was difficult for me to adapt to the rules of the center because I had always worked with an individual coach. »
You have 54.34% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.