Eugenie Bouchard gets to end her career in a way she rarely experienced it, on her own terms.
Fourteen years after making her first appearance in her hometown tournament, Eugenie Bouchard has chosen the 2025 Canadian Open to hang up her racket. It brings to a close a career lit early by brilliance, but ultimately blighted by injury, curiously persistent criticism of her off-court life, and, most poignantly, a peak that arrived very early and never quite came again.
When she burst onto the tennis scene in 2014, few were expecting her aggressive, hard-hitting game, typified by an accurate, devastating two-handed backhand that would often hit the line with such precision that her opponents were left scrambling before the rally got going.
Her breakthrough year featured her first WTA title, semi-final runs at both the Australian Open and the French Open, and was capped by a remarkable charge to the Wimbledon final, where she fell short to an inspired Petra Kvitová. Few would have imagined that, eleven years later, that run would still stand as the high point, not the start of a rise, but as good as it ever got.
Her career was beset by numerous injury layoffs, with the concussion she suffered at the 2015 US Open causing perhaps the greatest disruption. In 2018, her negligence case against the USTA was successful, but three years is a long time for the shadow of an injury to hang over an athlete’s head.
With a chronic shoulder injury, abdominal tears, and persistent lower-body strains also adding to her time on the sidelines, there was no real chance for Bouchard to gain a flicker of momentum in her following years on tour. She had to adjust from being a potential marquee star to an understudy, hoping her body would hold together long enough to reclaim a lead role.
During the significant periods of downtime and recovery in her career, Bouchard pursued other ventures such as modelling, brand endorsements, and expanding her social media presence. For something that seems quite natural now, in a world where anyone, regardless of fame, uses social media to build a career, Bouchard received a lot of negative attention for doing so. She discussed this on the Nothing Major podcast last year:
“Back in the day, you really had to do only tennis or else you would get hate, and then I think the pendulum has swung so far the other way these days, which is a positive because now, it’s actually like, ‘Oh, if you don’t have your own skin care line and you don’t have a foundation line, what are you doing?’. So I think it’s great that players nowadays can not only play tennis, and do a bunch of other stuff and not get the hate for it that I experienced.”
Whatever misfortunes have befallen her during her career, she seems at peace with the decision to end her tennis career on home soil. She will remain in the sporting world, being currently under a three-year contract with the Professional Pickleball Association, who are surely delighted to have her competitive focus fully trained on their circuit.
To have peaked so early in her career only to never climb those heights again will surely be a source of frustration for the Canadian. No matter what, she will always hold a firm grip on that golden year, and hopefully, any regrets will fade into the shadows as she moves on after one final toss of the ball in Montreal.
