US Open: Great talent, great demands: Naomi Osaka withstands the pressure

Naomi Osaka is made a star after the example of the Williams sisters. With the first successes, the Japanese player’s expectations are also growing, which go far beyond tennis.

In New York, the tennis world got an idea of the enormous pressure this young woman with the wild curly mane is under. After reaching the quarter-finals of the US Open, Naomi Osaka cried, but the Japanese girl was not only crying with joy. It was much more a relief to finally meet expectations.

“Every time at a Grand Slam, I was asked if I could make it through the third round. When I was in round four in Australia, people asked: “Are you getting any closer, or was that it?”, Osaka explained her emotional outburst after the 6:3, 2:6, 6:4 against Belarussian Aryna Sabalenka.

The demands on Osaka sound unfair, after all she is only 20 years old and is only playing her eleventh Grand Slam tournament. However, they are derived from their history and go far beyond tennis. So far that it can’t go fast enough for her and that a victory in the last sixteen is enough to make the burden on her shoulders visible.

But first things first: Naomi Osaka was born in the city of the same name in Japan as the daughter of a Japanese and a New Yorker with roots in Haiti. Mother Tamaki was considered a disgrace to her family by the liaison with Leonard Francois, the conservative country still adheres to the myth of homogeneity. Osaka is therefore for traditional circles only a “Hafu”, a half Japanese, just like her two years older sister Mari.

A reason for the family to move to the USA. Naomi is two years old when her father makes a foolhardy plan. I want his daughters to grow up like Williams’ sisters. “The blueprint was there. I just had to follow her,” Leonard Francois told the New York Times about his role model Richard Williams, who raised Serena and Venus to tennis stars from an early age.

And indeed, Naomi and Mari Osaka have become tennis professionals, the bigger potential has the smaller one. Their Munich coach Sascha Bajin, long employed in Serena Williams’ team, says of his protégé: “I played with Serena for almost eight years, and Naomi’s weapons are as big as hers. “She’s not afraid of the big stage, so I think she’s got something big inside her.”

Naomi Osaka proved this last year when she declassified defending champion Angelique Kerber in New York. In Indian Wells in March she won her first title, shortly afterwards she won against her idol Serena Williams in Miami. Osaka will face Lesia Tsurenko from Ukraine in their first Grand Slam quarter-final on Wednesday.

Osaka’s agent Stuart Duguid is already rubbing his hands, and marketing opportunities in Asia and the USA are boundless before the Tokyo Summer Games 2020. But Duguid thinks beyond that. He hopes that Osaka will change “the perception” of “Hafu” in Japan for the better. “She can be an ambassador of change,” says Duguid. A lot of pressure for a 20-year-old who has the greatest expectations of herself on the tennis court. Tears can flow.