Emma Raducanu Odds: Can Brit Star win the 2022 Grand Slam?

She is the teen tennis titan of 2021. The US Open champion who began the year prepping for her A-Levels. The Wimbledon wildcard, ranked outside the top 300, she reached the fourth round in her first major tournament. Celebration has turned to expectation with mere weeks until 2022, and what sort of year the 19-year-old from Kent is expected to have is indicated by the following odds.

She is set to see out the year by collecting the prestigious Sports Personality of the Year award this December, being miles ahead of the market at 1/16, to nearest contenders Tom Daley (14/1) and Lewis Hamilton (40/1). With a tennis calendar thankfully returned to normality (touch wood), several weeks after screeching out Auld Lang Syne, Raducanu will be heading to the first major of the year with the Australian Open beginning on Monday 17th January until Sunday 30th.

14/1 with BoyleSports, she’s the third-favourite to win on the Melbourne hard court, the same type of surface in which she claimed her maiden victory in September when she ended Britain's 44-year wait for a women's Grand Slam singles champion as she beat Leylah Fernandez without a slip in the Arthur Ashe Stadium. Raducanu did not drop a set throughout the tournament, and became the first qualifier - male or female - in the history of tennis to make the final and then win a grand slam tournament.

Since then she's been unfortunate to come under the intense scrutiny of the media gaze and unfair criticism from certain sporting peers after being slung into the spotlight and has been unwanted baggage accompanying her to the subsequent year-ending events of Indian Wells (Round of 64), the Transylvanian Open (Quarters) and Linz (Round of 16). But, as was her wont on the court, she has handled the attempted smashes with grace, decorum, the utmost and that beaming smile that has become one of 2021’s most prevailing sporting images. Whether that can be maintained as the pressure of being the UK’s Numero One will be a commendable challenge in itself, and the odds haven’t done her any favours in easing the expectancy of future accomplishments.

Bearing in mind only six women in history have managed the feat, and only four in the Open Era for Raducanu to win over 15 majors across her career is a paltry 66/1. Raducanu to become the first woman since 1988 to win all four singles Grand Slams in 2022 is positioned at 200/1 (Paddy Power). The closest anyone has come to the feat since Steffi Graf in the unparalleled classic Golden Slam year is the great Serena Williams, who bagged all but her mantlepiece staple from her usual stomping ground of Flushing Meadows after being stunned by Italian Roberta Vinci in the semi-finals in 2015, though did hold all four titles at the same time. 

Though the Australian Open will not be a dissimilar environment to her audacious exploits in New York and 14/1 is a good solid pricing, as the season progresses and Roland Garros and Wimbledon raises its head, Raducanu to stake claim will become increasingly difficult. In particular Raducanu will not have the experience to make the transition from clay to grass as easily as more of her seasoned competitors on the circuit. For a breakdown of the individual Grand Slam competitions across 2022, Raducanu is priced at the following: Australian Open - 14/1 (Boyle Sports), Wimbledon - 7/1 (Betfred), French Open Odds - 14/1 (PaddyPower), US Open Odds - 13/2 (Betfair).

This month Raducanu broke into the top 20 in the WTA rankings for the very first time and though has missed out on the prestigious WTA Finals currently taking place in Mexico, was the highest-ranked player at the Tour’s Upper Austria Ladies Linz tournament, her final competition of an incredible season: Raducanu would lose to Wang Xinyu of China, a player 106th in the current rankings, in a three-set thriller.

But, such is her stratospheric rise, more attractively, for her to be WTA World Number 1 by the end of 2022 is 12/1 with William Hill. 27 women have held the ranking since its inauguration with Chris Evert in 1975 and the two most recent table-toppers  - Ashleigh Barty and Simona Halep - have done so within 12 months of their first title.

For the patriot in you, for Raducanu to emulate Virgina Wade in 1977 and win Wimbledon as the first female British champion in nearly half a century, and for England to end their 66-year-wait for football to truly come home and lift the World Cup in Qatar next window is far from a immediate wallet-grabbing attraction of 66/1.