As the summer of Emma Raducanu begins, just let her play her natural game

There is a temptation to wince just a little each time a news item or a social media line drops containing the words Emma Raducanu. Not because of anything to do with Raducanu herself, who will shortly hit the one-year anniversary of her entry into the full women’s tour, during which she has been not just startlingly successful but gracious in defeat and polished in public, rattling through the chaos, the bruises, the wrong turns of a debut teenage year in professional sport. She looks happy. This is all good, isn’t it?

And yet, of course, that’s not the whole story. Raducanu was in the news for two reasons this week. First her exit from the Madrid Open, beaten by Anhelina Kalinina in the third round. And second for her appearance in something called the Forbes 30 Under 30 List, the kind of self-generating media gush that allows people to produce titillating web galleries of glossy, aspirational people, but also gives an idea of brand value, marketing heft, career trajectory.

Raducanu is in there, along with Mo Salah – who is 30 next month and already worth $90m – plus an endless scroll of people who look like kind of high-end London estate agents who say things like “amassing over four thousand square feet” but who turn out on closer inspection to be start-up whizzes, influencer types, hit-the-jackpot investors and the like.

Forbes is a weird publication, a kind of airport lounge lifestyle jazz mag. But it makes a good list. And as ever, with Raducanu as the headline name, this one drew the usual spume of online snark, rage and counter-rage. This is just the way it seems to work. Raducanu triggers people, and triggers them in curious ways. Throughout the last year she has been trailed by a weirdly personal strain of