Victoria Mboko is the tennis tornado the game needs. We all love a prodigy narrative, and there’s nothing like a teenager tearing through draws. And nothing like a teen entering her home tournament, a WTA 1000, with a wild card, and ending up with the trophy after beating another former teen wonder, Naomi Osaka, to clinch the biggest title of a career that has just started.

After Carlos Alcaraz, who’s been defying gravity since winning the US Open at 19 in 2022, and Mirra Andreeva, who’s become a solid top 5 to top 10 player at just 17, the mantle, it seems, has now been passed to Victoria “Vicky” Mboko, an 18-year-old wonder from Canada. 

Mboko ended the 2024 season ranked 350th in the world, and now, not even a year later, she is guaranteed a spot in the top 30 (24). “I want to win every match I play,” Mboko told me back in March, and she still sings the same tune in August, saying after dispatching Coco Gauff in the round of 16 in Montreal last week: “When you play a tournament, the goal is to win it.” Tennis, made simple.

As Montreal is rightfully losing its mind over the epic run of the teenager, those who’ve been following Mboko’s season closely saw it coming. On her home soil, the Ontario native, from French-speaking Congolese parents, is displaying why she’s been, outside of the Slams, one of the best stories in the game. 

After beating Elena Rybakina to reach her maiden WTA 1000 final, Mboko became the first Canadian to defeat three former Grand Slam champions (Rybakina, Gauff, and Sofia Kenin) in a single WTA event in the Open Era. Osaka made four. And in one single match, she showed why she was turning all heads around this year: She has learned in less than a year how to play and manage matches like a top 10 player. She plays as if she already belongs.

It takes less than a minute for anyone watching Mboko play to stop, gasp, and wow. She possesses a level of effortless power and charisma that draws crowds, along with the risk-taking temperament that comes with it, and an infectious positive energy. She will leave opponents meters away from the ball, whatever their ranking or experience. Her tennis is the definition of bold and unimpressed. She also shows a nice tennis IQ and solid variety in her game. At 18, she walks out there and plays as if she has been playing that way for a decade. Of course, we know it’s easier at that age to swing freely, and that pressure will keep mounting. “We shouldn’t forget that it’s important she keeps smiling out there,” Noelle Van Lottum, who is on Mboko’s coaching team and is also head of women’s tennis at Tennis Canada, told me this year. “What’s most important is that everybody remains calm around her and that we keep helping her improve. Vicky needs to keep that joy to play.” It will be key to keep now more than ever. 

Yet her honeymoon phase is fascinating to witness, especially because it’s been percolating for a while. People discovering Mboko through her Montreal run need to understand she’s not a one-week wonder, because Mboko has been improving steadily all year. In the first six ITF events she played in 2025, she won five. When I had my first chat with her back in March, when Mboko was awarded a wild card for Miami’s WTA 1000, her record was 27–1. And she was as bubbly-but-determined about it all as she is now with her 53–9 record. 

Mboko is here to win big, that is all. She’s not a longtime Serena Williams fan for nothing. Yet she won’t get ahead of herself, as she already experienced how rough the journey could be when she got sidelined for six months last year due to a knee injury. That’s the thing we don’t want to dwell on, for fear of jinxing her—that Mboko’s main worry moving forward won’t be developing her game but managing her body. After the final, Mboko announced that she will skip Cincy to rehab a wrist injury she picked up during her semifinal against Rybakina, ahead of the US Open. The sport has just one job here: not burning that kid out. “I don’t have so many people around me, and it’s kept me very calm and very comfortable,” she told me this summer. Quiet off the court but enjoying the frenzy of a big court’s crowd is also Mboko’s recipe: She’s been swinging in Montreal in front of a packed crowd entirely devoted to her without being overwhelmed; another sign of a solid foundation. More? You can see she’s enjoying it.

 People will say that, with such power and physicality, one tends to move up the ladder quicker. True. But what is also making Mboko’s ascent to the top fascinating, like Andreeva’s, is how quickly she learns. She took over the ITF level in a winter, won her first match in a WTA 1000 in Miami in March, qualified for Rome and won a match before losing to Gauff in three sets in April, then qualified and got to the third round at Roland-Garros, was a match away from qualifying for Wimbledon, then got a lucky loser spot and won her first-round match. And she’s now in her first WTA 1000 final, becoming only the third wild card to achieve this in Canada in the Open Era after Monica Seles (1995) and Simona Halep (2015). She lost against Gauff in Rome and beat her in Canada. She lost against Rybakina in Washington and beat her in Canada. She learns at a speed that will scare a field already busy managing the Andreeva rise. What’s also both scary for her rivals and absolutely amazing for the rest of us is that Mboko is already that good despite having a huge margin of improvement. When they say the sky is the limit, she’s the definition of it.

The last Canadian woman to play in a final at home was Bianca Andreescu, who won there in 2019 and went on to win the US Open. She could be a good example for Mboko, as her rise was also spectacular, but the journey kept getting harder. Mboko, like Andreescu, isn’t a hype; she’s the real deal. It’s no guarantee to become the next Serena, Maria, Iga, Aryna, or Naomi, but it’s a great chance to have a fair shot at it. “To get this result in a tournament like this is a huge turning point for me,” said the teen wonder in Montreal, already aware of how a tennis journey can be slowed or fast-forwarded. In Montreal, it may have skyrocketed.