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If you follow Open Court, you already knew this was likely a week ago.
But after being noncommittal about the possibility of Genie Bouchard getting a wild card into this year’s Montreal edition of the Omnium Banque Nationale a few weeks ago, when the entry list was revealed, Tennis Canada confirmed on Wednesday that the 31-year-old Westmount native would indeed be playing in the main draw.
It will be (as we also wrote) her career finale.
There’s even a video!
You could certainly quibble with the notion of a player who until last week hadn’t played a tennis match in nearly a year, getting a free pass into a tournament the size of the Omnium Banque Nationale.
The same would apply to 35-year-old Vasek Pospisil, who is expected to get similar treatment for the Toronto event, where the men are competing this year.
(Him going out quickly in two matches in the qualifying at back-to-back Challengers in Winnipeg and Granby the last two weeks didn’t do much to buttress his case).
And the same could easily be said of 45-year-old Venus Williams, who received a main draw wild card into the Mubadala Citi DC Open next week, after barely playing the last few years.
But even if Bouchard’s career spiraled downward in a fair hurry after that 2014 Wimbledon final, due in no small part to the concussion she suffered at the 2015 US Open, there’s no arguing that her success put a somewhat fledgling Canadian national training program on the map.
Just two years before, she and Filip Peliwo – both training at the national centre – won junior Wimbledon. While Peliwo’s career never lived up to that promise (he’s still competing, but under the Polish flag), it legitimized the national federation’s effort to develop top-ranked players.
Milos Raonic’s efforts also were a huge contributing factor, although Bouchard’s notoriety far eclipsed his despite relative more modest accomplishments, for reasons we don’t really have to relitigate.
Plus, Tennis Canada has eight main draw wild cards to dispense for the women’s event (only five on the men’s side). So it’s a good use of one of them.
Bouchard will either play Sunday or Monday in the first round of the expanded 96-player singles draw, depending on what shakes out in the draw to be held a week from Saturday.
With the tournament having to sell an additional 85,000 tickets this year, including that extra “round of 128” that’s played before the 32 seeds swing into action, there’s no doubt this will be a solid ticket seller.
Bouchard’s tennis star may have dimmed. But she remains a high-profile athlete – especially in Canada, and even more particularly in Montreal. Despite her struggles in the Canadian event over the years, there’s no telling how many extra tickets she sold.
A year ago in Toronto, Bouchard received a wild card into the qualifying. She was extremely competitive against Japan’s Moyuka Uchijima (ranked No. 63 then, she broke into the top 50 in May), going down 5-7, 7-5, 6-4.
She had played just one tournament in 2024 going into that match, a $60,000 ITF in Florida that May in which she won two matches, but ran out of gas and retired after two long sets in the quarterfinals.
This year, she also played one – but it was just two weeks ago, on grass in Newport. She won a match in doubles and was out in the first round of singles.
Her social media indicates she’s training on a hard court in the New York City area with fellow former junior Wimbledon champion Noah Rubin (who also took the pickleball track awhile back).
You can only hope that she draws a big crowd for her sendoff, and that the support will propel her to playing the absolute best she can before she’s off into the pickleball sunset with a video, a plaque or whatever else they have planned for her.
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