Sat. Oct 5th, 2024
Occasional Digest - a story for you

Sebastian Sachs and Belinda Bencici
Sebastian Sachs (left, with Belinda Bencic) is Emma Raducanu’s fifth coach in 18 months

Emma Raducanu has appointed Sebastian Sachs as her new coach.

The 30-year-old German, who guided Belinda Bencic to Olympic gold last year, has started working with the Briton, last year’s US Open champion.

Sachs is in Abu Dhabi with Raducanu, who lost on Friday to Wimbledon runner-up Ons Jabeur 5-7 6-3 (10-8) in an exhibition match on her injury return.

The German had a brief career as a player on the Futures tour, but has enjoyed plenty of success as a coach.

Before helping Bencic into the world’s top 10, he worked with Julia Gorges and before that as part of Victoria Azarenka’s team.

Sachs will be Raducanu’s fifth coach in 18 months. This year, the 20-year-old Briton has worked with first Torben Beltz and then Dmitry Tursunov.

Tursunov decided not to continue the partnership after this year’s US Open, despite Raducanu’s improved performances since Wimbledon.

The Russian spoke in late October of “red flags” and potential problems further down the line if she continued to listen to too many voices.

“She’s probably a two-and-a-half-year project. Her game is very raw,” the 39-year-old Tursunov told tennismajors.com.external-link

“It’s going to take some time, but as I said to her and to pretty much everyone on her team, ‘I think you just need to have one voice and just try that for a bit’.

“I could have stuck around, I could have agreed on everything that her team proposed, but, deep down, I felt like that wasn’t the right thing to do,”

Tursunov is now coaching Bencic.

Raducanu has only been able to return to full training in the past 10 days after a wrist injury ended her season prematurely.

But in that time she has been working with Andy Murray’s former physical trainer Jez Green.

The British number one is set to start her 2023 season in Auckland in the first week of the new year.

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