On Monday, Johanna Konta entered the world’s top 10 for the first time. She becomes only the fourth British female tennis player in history to achieve this feat after Virginia Wade, Sue Barker and Jo Durie. Konta’s rankings boost comes on the back of a remarkable year which saw her reach her first grand slam semi-final, in Australia in January and defeat a slew of top 10 players. What makes Konta’s rise quite so astonishing is how quickly her assault on the rankings has been. Just eighteen months ago, she was ranked outside of the world’s top 150 but in mid-2015, something clicked and she has become one of the most controlled and consistent players on the WTA Tour.
Konta’s journey is an interesting one. The usual path to the world’s top ten is to be a promising junior, make your mark on the senior circuit in your late teenage years and then make your breakthrough in your early twenties. Konta has not followed this trajectory. As a junior, her results were wholly uninspiring and in fact, Australia, her country of birth and whom she represented as a junior, rescinded her funding due to her poor results.
After moving to Britain, the country of her parents, she became a British citizen in 2012 but at this stage, nobody was paying a blind bit of notice to the adopted Brit; all eyes were on the prodigious talent of Laura Robson, who had won junior Wimbledon in 2008 and had been touted as the ‘next big thing’ in tennis in Britain. At this stage, Konta was nothing more than a journeyman player and the assumption was that as she was in her mid-twenties and had made little impact on the tour to date, it seemed unlikely that she would become anything other than an average tour player.
Yet Konta’s 2016 season has highlighted the danger of deciding an athletes fate by the time they hit 20 years old. Now aged 25, Konta is the definition of a late bloomer and her journey highlights the precariousness of the current funding system in the UK, particularly for Olympic sports.
Athletes who are funded by UK Sport and receive a ‘salary’ go onto a performance pathway. There are three levels of funding for athletes who are deemed to have the potential to be world-class; Band C is for athletes who demonstrate that they have the capacity to win a world or Olympic medal within four years, Band B is for those who have had a top-8 finish at world championships or Olympics and Band A is for those who are world or Olympic medallists.
This means that for up-and-coming athletes, they have four years from the point they get on UK Sport funding to win a medal at a global championship. If this criteria had been applied to Konta when she was 19, she would have been binned before she got the opportunity to work out what she needed to do to her game in order to compete with the world’s best.
The UK Sport model is designed to benefit prodigious talents, athletes who excel early in their careers; it does not allow much leeway for athletes who may need longer than four years to work out how to get the best from themselves. One of the reasons for this is that UK Sport does not have a bottomless pit of money and to be fair to them, they cannot go around funding every Tom, Dick and Harry on the off chance that they may come good in 6 or 8 years time.
But there is much that goes into making a world-class athlete and talent is only a tiny part of it. Konta is the prime example of an athlete who had the physical capability to perform well but did not have the mental capability to match- only in the past year-or-so has she been able to harness the psychological. There are always athletes who are able to bring everything together as teens; in tennis alone think Maria Sharapova, Martina Hingis and Belinda Bencic. But an inability to get everything together right away does not mean it will never happen.
Another flaw of the funding system in the UK is that it can discourage athletes from going to university and instead, they become full-time athletes straight from school. There are some sports which would rather their athletes went full-time at 18 because university can, potentially, slow their athletic development. This is incredibly short-sighted. Being a full-time athlete is a privilege but there are, without question, negatives about it and to be a full-time athlete from such a young age sure increases your chances of being scunnered by your sport by the time you’re in your mid-twenties.
The challenge is that every athlete develops at a different rate and there is no one path that will ensure success. But it has to be remembered that a lack of early success doesn’t mean that it will never come. Just ask Johanna Konta.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here