At first glance, the story of Clara Tauson’s career appears to be that of a talented junior who lost her way. There is a tendency to expect gifted youngsters to either arrive fully formed or to develop on a linear path — the reality is rarely like that.
Tauson won the girls’ singles at the 2019 Australian Open. In the four majors prior, there were four different girls’ singles winners. Two have gone on to be Grand Slam champions: Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff. The other two are Liang En-shuo and Wang Xiyu, ranked No. 153 and No. 95 in the world. The four winners of the four junior majors after Tauson’s win? Leylah Fernandez, a U.S. Open finalist and now world No. 30; Daria Snigur (currently world No. 125); Camia Osorio (No. 52); and Victoria Jimenez Kasintseva (No. 151.) Many more junior champions find themselves down the rankings than make it to the top of the sport — and even those that do often take longer than their first flush of success might have implied.
Advertisement
In a stirring week in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where she has beaten world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka, Tauson has achieved the milestones to go with two years and a couple of months of sustained improvement. Either side of a straight-sets win over Sabalenka came a nervy, tense and tight win over former world No. 3 Elina Svitolina and a gritty triumph over Czech rising star Linda Noskova, who served for the first set of their quarterfinal before Tauson came back to win that set in a tiebreak.
Tauson, 22 years old and a tall, big hitter from Denmark, would have entered the world’s top 30 for the first time Monday whatever had happened in her semifinal against Karolina Muchová Friday — six years on from that junior Australian Open win as a 16-year-old. After another three-set win, Tauson is into her final at a WTA 1,000 event, the rung just below the Grand Slams, where she will play Mirra Andreeva, the only teenager inside the WTA top 100.
These things can take time. At the last Grand Slam, the Australian Open, Madison Keys became a first-time major champion aged 29 — almost two decades after she was first told that winning a Grand Slam title was her destiny.
Tauson didn’t quite have to deal with that level of expectation, but when she backed up her junior win in Melbourne by coming through qualifying and beating America’s No. 25 seed Jennifer Brady in her Grand Slam debut at the French Open in September 2020, things looked promising. In February 2021, she won her first WTA title in Lyon as a qualifier, having just turned 18. She entered the world’s top 100, becoming the youngest player in that bracket after Gauff. Expectation in Denmark ramped up, with the country desperate for a successor to former Australian Open champion and world No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki.
But in a sign of things to come, Tauson suffered a knee injury soon after and the following year had to deal with a back problem that saw her ranking plummet from No. 33 in February 2022 to No. 140 eight months later. It meant a return to ITF events, the level below the WTA Tour — and a feeling akin to relegation for those in team sports.
Advertisement
Tauson started to build herself back up last year, reaching the fourth round at Roland Garros, a personal best at the majors. Having won the Auckland Open in January before reaching the Australian Open third round — where she lost in a tight match to Sabalenka in which neither player found it easy to hold serve — she has made a strong start to 2025 with a 14-3 record, one of those defeats a withdrawal with illness in Doha, Qatar, last week.
“I was injured from quite a young age unfortunately, but I hopefully still have many years left on the tour,” she said of her career path in a recent interview.
“It’s a difficult thing to be at a high level and then get injured and then have to come back. Obviously, I’ve been struggling with it for the last couple of years, but I’m moving in the right direction and I work really hard, so it’s going to come off at some point.”
Tauson explained that to stay fit, less has been more. “My whole career I’ve been training a lot and it’s been hard on my body,” she said.
“I’m a bigger individual and my tennis is very powerful, so we realised that I wasn’t doing any good by training six hours a day. We turned the volume down a bit, but the intensity became a lot higher. That’s been very important.”
GO DEEPER
Madison Keys fulfils her tennis destiny on a breezy night in Melbourne
Before the Australian Open, she said in a news conference that her biggest goal for the year was to stay fit. Backing up a win against Svitolina that lasted two hours and 41 minutes by beating Sabalenka the following day, and then going again to defeat Noskova the day after that, was a very positive step.
Tauson is a powerful player who stands at 6 feet (183cm) and, by her own admission, has not always been a great mover. Once in position, she packs a punch comparable to Sabalenka and the game’s biggest hitters. Her serve is one of her biggest weapons and Tauson leads the WTA leaderboard for aces in 2025, but more important is how her serve has shown the linear kind of progress that injuries did not allow her career to follow.
Advertisement
Tauson made just over 57 percent of her first serves in 2023 and 2024; the same is true thus far in 2025. But her first-serve points won percentage has risen from 65.2 to 70.4 to 73.3, and her ace rate has climbed even more sharply from 3.9 percent to 8.4 percent and is now over 11 percent. Her first serve is landing in the same amount, but she is winning more points, more easily, year-on-year. She is becoming more efficient. Against Sabalenka Wednesday, she made 52 percent of her first serves to Sabalenka’s 59 percent, but she won 80 percent of those points vs. 46 percent.
“I love watching Rybakina and Sabalenka,” Tauson said. “Also because they’re kind of the same size as me height-wise and maybe doing some of the same stuff.” Against the Belarusian, it was Tauson who was doing those things far, far better than her opponent.
One of the biggest reasons for Tauson’s improvement over the past few months has been a shakeup of her coaching team. She stopped working with Lars Christensen, who has since started working again with Tauson’s compatriot and contemporary Holger Rune. Tauson’s new coach is former hitting partner Kasper Elsvad and, in another parallel with Keys, who is thriving while being coached by her husband Bjorn Fratangelo, Elsvad is also Tauson’s boyfriend.
A fellow member of the Kjøbenhavns Boldklub in Copenhagen, Elsvad has been working on Tauson’s backhand, which she says is a weakness. In January, she told Danish reporters that working on it had been a big focus of her pre-season. One of those reporters was Kresten Gravesen, who covers tennis for national broadcaster DR. In a phone interview Thursday, he said it’s as though Tauson’s team has “put some magic into it. She’s hitting it with a lot more confidence.”
The turnaround since bringing Elsvad on as her main coach in September came after a tough period last summer. Following her loss to Ons Jabeur in the fourth round of the French Open, a match where the Tunisian’s drop shots exposed her physicality, Tauson lost six straight matches. Jabeur called her opponent “a great player” in her post-match news conference, but she said her own tactic to “play the whole court worked really well because at certain times she didn’t know where to move exactly.”
Tauson’s movement has looked sharper this year, including against Noskova, when she chased down a drop shot in the first set that might have eluded her last year.
point of the week contender 🤔#DDFTennis pic.twitter.com/ZjDpqVoD4Y
— wta (@WTA) February 20, 2025
That Jabeur defeat also saw Tauson frequently becoming exasperated and gesturing angrily towards her coach. Staying cool on court has been a challenge, where in contrast to her laid-back persona off it, she can get down on herself. This year, with her small team of Elsvad and a new hitting partner, Tauson has appeared more relaxed than ever. To help chill out, Tauson says she spends her downtime watching Scandinavian crime shows and reading crime books. The Julie Hastrup series about a female detective has been a particular favourite.
Advertisement
During the early part of her career, Tauson trained at the Justine Henin Academy in Belgium. The two have very different game styles, but Henin, a seven-time Grand Slam champion, recognized something in the youngster. “She had a lot of injuries but has lots of qualities, and she’ll be back where she was and I wish for her to be even higher,” Henin said in a phone interview last year. “She has time to keep developing and can really still grow up on the tour and (be someone) that we’ll see a lot more of.”
Tauson said that despite their stylistic differences, she has tried to incorporate some of the Belgian’s defensive skills into her game.
Henin won her first Grand Slam at the French Open a few days after her 21st birthday in 2003. Tauson is taking a bit longer to get to her best level, which in Denmark some believe could be the top 10 by the end of the year. Gravesen says the country loves an underdog story and Tauson’s reemergence has captured the public’s imagination — especially when Rune appears to be on the opposite trajectory.
In Dubai, Tauson is showing the importance of staying patient. Like Keys, another overnight sensation years in the making.
(Top photo: Christopher Pike / Getty Images)
