Emma Raducanu could silence Doubters at Olympics next yearAfter Showing Off…

Emma Raducanu
will miss national team duty again next month after Great Britain confirmed
their four-woman line-up for the Billie Jean King Cup clash with Sweden – and
it could jeopardise herOlympic
dream.

The 2021 US Open champion

is still recovering fromtriple surgery on a set of injuries that have kept her
out since April

, and intends to return to court at a Chinese exhibition event in December.

There was a slim hope that she might see the Copper Box Arena in London as a
supportive venue for her comeback match but 11 November has just come too early
in her rehabilitation.

Instead, Katie Boulter, Harriet Dart, Jodie Burrage and Heather Watson will
take on Sweden, with victory required to give Britain any chance of reaching
next year’s Billie Jean King Cup Finals.

Even to do so, they would still have to win another tie in April next year,
one that will also represent Raducanu’s last chance to represent her country in
this Olympic cycle.

The 20-year-old has only played for Great Britain once in her senior career,
Easter 2022 against Czechia. She missed the Finals last year in Glasgow

with the beginning of the wrist injury that has blighted her ever since, and
was unavailable for the clash with France earlier this year.

Raducanu said she “would love to play the Olympics”, where the tennis will be
held at Roland Garros next summer, but qualification is now not straightforward.

By International Tennis Federation (ITF) rules, a player is only eligible if
they have been part of a Billie Jean King Cup team at least twice in the
four-year cycle leading up to the tournament. Raducanu has only done so once,
and will only have one more opportunity to do so, in April next year.

If she does not make that, she could appeal to the ITF Olympic Committee for a
discretionary exemption based on injury. She will probably have at least one
friendly voice on that committee in the shape of Sandi Procter, the LTA’s
president, but there are 13 other voting members of that committee who will
need convincing of Raducanu’s commitment to ITF competition. She will not be
helped in that regard by her comments in Indian Wells, when she told reporters
she didn’t even know when GB’s next tie was. It was just a month away and she
did not play.

But that was before the surgery. Raducanu’s wrist problems, often veiled from
the public in an effort to limit any tactical advantage to her opponents, were
causing her pain every day and it’s easy to see why she would shun the idea of
adding more load to her schedule.

The Olympics next summer though represents a huge opportunity. Since the
golden summer of 2021, Raducanu has endured the other side of the double-edged
sword that is the bosom of the British public. Injuries and expectations have
worn her down. “I’ve been very high and very low,” she toldThe Times

in June.

She would do well to remember the highs. Her run to the fourth round of
Wimbledon was a national event, drawing huge TV audiences and catapulting her
into viewers’ affections. Afterher stress-related retirement against Ajla
Tomljanovic

, she appeared on BBC TV to talk about her defeat wearing an England shirt: it
was an inspired piece of PR, probably the most successful of her short career
so far. It tied her success and image to the tidal wave of excitement following
the England football team, so that when she won the US Open, a slam that
sometimes goes under the radar on pay TV and mostly in the small hours,
everyone was ready to celebrate.