You’d be forgiven for not being familiar with Victoria Mboko around the time of Australian Open 2025.
While the world’s best players competed in Melbourne for the year’s first Grand Slam event, the Canadian teenager was ranked 337th and playing at an ITF event in Guadeloupe, a French territory in the Caribbean.
Now, she’s into the third round at Roland Garros, owns a provisional ranking of world No.89, and will face Chinese superstar Zheng Qinwen – no doubt on a court where more people can catch a glimpse of her obvious talent.
“I feel really happy right now, and yeah, of course there is so much happening even, like, behind the scenes. I feel like my family has been doing a good job of keeping me really, I guess, isolated from it all,” said Mboko, who is in Paris with her father and elder sister and brother.
“I have just been enjoying the moment. I don't have so many people around me, and it's kept me very calm and very comfortable.
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“Honestly, I would have never expected that [top 100 debut] at all. It's really exciting, but I didn't know at all, to be honest, until I think my parents told me.
“That's a really great accomplishment. I mean, who wouldn't want to be top 100? You're amongst one of the top, best in the world. You're playing Grand Slams all the time.”
It’s been an extraordinary rise for Mboko, the daughter of Congolese parents, Cyprien and Godee Kitadi, and the youngest of four tennis-playing siblings.
She won her first four ITF tournaments of the season without dropping a set, building streaks of 20 consecutive match wins and 40 consecutive sets won. In early March she won a fifth ITF title in Porto, Portugal.
She earned a wildcard into the Miami Open – just the second WTA main draw of her career – where she upset Camila Osorio for her first tour-level victory.
Representing Canada in the Billie Jean King Cup Qualifiers, she went undefeated in singles play, and later qualified for the WTA 1000 tournament in Rome, where she pushed Coco Gauff to three sets in the second round.
“Victoria played great tennis. She forced me to play like that. So full credit to her,” Gauff said after her entertaining 3-6 6-2 6-1 win.
“First I saw her [was at the] Miami Open. I didn't know much about her before, but I've been following her since Miami. I think she's a great player. I knew it was going to be a tough match. Like the ranking difference looks different, but she's playing top-level tennis.
“She obviously has a great game… For sure on the movement, I would say she's up there with me on that.”
High praise indeed, from the world No.2 and one of the game’s great athletes.
There were more great results to come for the 18-year-old, who beat three straight top-100 opponents to reach the WTA 125K final in Parma, Italy.
It meant she arrived in Paris with a 7-3 record on clay and carrying momentum into the qualifying event, where she won three matches in straight sets to make her Grand Slam main-draw debut.
Two more straight sets wins – over last year’s Wimbledon quarterfinalist Lulu Sun, and Eva Lys, an exciting fourth-round finisher at AO 2025 – have propelled her into the third round, where Zheng awaits.
The eighth seed’s previous trip to Roland Garros saw her winning gold for China in the women’s singles at the Paris Olympics.
Zheng represents an almighty mountain for the Canadian to climb, but Mboko has now won 40 of her 45 matches this year and is determined to treat the experience as just another one of those matches.
“I was struggling with a lot of injuries last year. I didn't really have a consistent tournament plan and training schedule. To be playing a lot of matches this year, to be doing what I've been doing so far, it's something that I would have never thought I would have done last year,” she said.
“Even to be here and playing even the quallies, I was so excited to be in a Grand Slam for the first ever time.
“I remember coming here as a junior, watching the older girls play. It was such a great experience. I'm happy I experienced it in the juniors so that it kind of prepared me for the professional level.
“Now I'm here, I feel like I can do something with it and make the most of it.”