Victoria Mboko insists she is just like any other Gen Z teenager. She enjoys going out to local cafés and shopping at Sephora with her older sister. Her headphones are always playing Drake, SZA, The Weeknd, and Kendrick Lamar. She tries to squeeze in a TV series—short seasons, please—every once in a while, but she pretty much always ends up revisiting her comfort show, Modern Family.
There is, however, nothing ordinary about Mboko’s meteoric rise in the tennis world. A couple weeks ago, the 18-year-old Canadian—she’ll turn 19 on Tuesday—won her first WTA Tour title in Montréal, becoming the youngest player since Serena Williams in 1999 to defeat four Grand Slam champions in one tournament. After beginning the year ranked 333rd in the world, Mboko has surged to 23rd and arrives in New York City as a potential dark horse for the US Open, where she is seeded (22nd) in the main draw of a major for the first time. (She plays Barbora Krejcikova at 11 a.m. today.) It’s the latest milestone in a breakout rookie season for Mboko, who has won 53 of her 62 matches in 2025.
Speaking by phone a few days before the Open kicked off, Mboko admits she’s still trying to process the significance of her big win in Montreal while, at the same time, grappling with how her life as she knew it has changed.
“A lot has happened, don’t get me wrong, but it makes me happy,” Mboko says, as she was being carted between TV studios during a hectic media day in Toronto. “After I came back from the finals and got to my hotel room, my phone was blowing up a little bit, but I was quite tired, so I just did what I could to fall asleep as soon as possible.”
Of all the messages that Mboko received, there is one that stands out: As Mboko fell to her knees on match point in Montreal, the crowd in Toronto, some 330 miles west—who were simultaneously following her match on their phones and watching the men’s singles final in person—abruptly broke out in cheers. Needless to say, Ben Shelton (who ended up winning the men’s event) and his opponent Karen Khachanov were bemused by the interruption. “Ben gave me a little bit of a shout out on his [Instagram] story, and he congratulated me on the week,” Mboko recalls. “I kind of apologized—I was like, ‘I’m sorry!’ It’s really funny that it happened, but we both were just happy for each other.”
