Wins, birthdays, and a puppy? Mirra Andreeva's many happy returns in Madrid (2024)

Mirra Andreeva, the Russian teenager who refuses to act her tennis age, knows that keeping too close an eye on her ranking can lead toall sorts of toxic brain games.

It can drive players to think of themselves as numbers rather than human beings. It can make them measure results rather than process — tracking movement up and down the ladder rather than how they are improving each day.

This mindset has a way of inserting itself into the brain at the most inconvenient time, sending players down the rabbit hole of the consequences of a win or a loss when the outcome is still up for debate, even at the crucial moments of a match, when they’re supposed to be focused on hitting the next ball.

As the Madrid Open reaches its final days, so many of the top women are still alive. That includes Andreeva’s hero, Ons Jabeur, as well as the world No 1, Iga Swiatek, and Elena Rybakina, the 2022 Wimbledon champion. All of them have fallen victim to the rankings obsession at some point in their careers — Swiatek burst into tears at the news of Ash Barty’s retirement when the Australian was world No 1, knowing it opened a door for her — and all of them, sometimes, still do.

Sorry: Andreeva can’t help it.

See, she and her mother, Raisa, who got her and her sister into tennis when they were toddlers in Siberia, cut a deal this year. Andreeva really wants a dog. She has noticed a handful of other players travel with their dogs. She wants one, badly. She’s arguing that it will be a kind of service pet and help her with the usual tensions of teenage life and the unusual ones of teenage life as a budding tennis star.

Her mother, ever the tennis mom, saw an opportunity to incentivize pet ownership. Make the top 20, she told Mirra, and you can get a dog.

“This is my goal for this year,” Andreeva said, combining her deadly serious tone with the twinkle in her eyes that tells you to add a wink in your mind.

Four months into the season, it looks like Raisa Andreeva is going to be toting some poop bags around in her luggage before too long. Her daughter celebrated her 17th birthday on Monday with the sort of win she has swiftly become known for.

Just when it looks like her (usually much more experienced) opponent has seized control, and the ghosts of narratives about inexperience and immaturity are becoming a little less nebulous, Andreeva looks down at her shoelaces, has a little chat with herself and vanquishes them.

She doesn’t just recover. She storms back.

This time, Jasmine Paolini, the 28-year-old from Italy, got the full Andreeva. Paolini, the world No 13, served for the first set at 5-3, then found herself on the receiving end of a flurry of hard, flat backhands and the steady determination that belies her age. Roughly 15 minutes later, Andreeva was stealing the first set in a tiebreaker. Give it another 30, and it was a victory in straight sets.

“She understands the game very well,” Paolini said of Andreeva when it was over. “She doesn’t seem like she is 17.”

The birthday dinner, however, had to wait. Within two hours, Andreeva was back on the court for a doubles match with her partner, Vera Zvonareva, who is — wait for it — 22(!) years older than she is. She and Zvonereva lost in straight sets.

The celebrations went undimmed.

She got earrings and a bracelet from her family and another bracelet from her agent. There was cake waiting for her back in her hotel room. Life was good.

A little over a year ago, barely anyone in tennis had even heard of Andreeva. She was 15 and hadn’t played a WTA Tour event — basic logic suggested she was still some distance from being able to compete against the best players in the world. She wasn’t even in the top 300.

However, she and her older sister, Erika, are represented by IMG, the sports and entertainment conglomerate that owns the Madrid Open. That helped her land one of the coveted wild card entries into the tournament, which organizers often give to stars who haven’t qualified by their ranking but can help sell tickets, or to prospects they deem worthy of a taste of the big stage.

The latter category of player does not generally last very long. Andreeva missed that memo.

She became one of the youngest players to beat a top-20 opponent, Beatriz Haddad Maia of Brazil. She then did it again in the next match, beating Magda Linette of Poland, who was double her age, and made the fourth round. A month later, she surged through qualifying to win a total of five matches at the French Open and six at Wimbledon, even though she had barely ever set foot on a grass court.

It’s been quite a year of transition. Andreeva knows that. And yet, in some ways, she feels that nothing has changed very much at all.

The most striking thing about the data behind her two runs in the Spanish capital is how similar things are 12 months on — aside from a swing in second serve points and return points won. Andreeva is more of a known quantity now, and her opponents know they have to put her on the back foot when they can.

Andreeva knows that she can do it right back to them — and for longer. In 2023, she won and lost every match at the tournament in two sets. This year, she’s already won two matches from one set down.

It’s a similar story mentally.

“Inside, I feel the same,” she said.

The past weeks have brought one significant change. Andreeva hired Conchita Martinez, the 1994 Wimbledon champion and former coach of Garbine Muguruza, a two-time Grand Slam champion who recently retired. It’s early days, but Andreeva said Martinez already has her working on a slice backhand, a staple of the Spaniard’s game. She is still learning how to use it, but has been throwing in the occasional slice to change the rhythm of points or when she is playing defense.

Martinez also has Andreeva hitting her Duolingo app on her phone a bit. She’s already essentially fluent in French and English in addition to her native Russian. Spanish is next.

“Right now, I just know the bad words,” she said.

Andreeva is far from a finished product, physically or mentally. She will no doubt get stronger as she evolves into a grown-up.

The mental side takes its own kind of work as well — work that she is already showcasing. She said when she got down in matches last year, she would basically hope her opponent would slip up and give her a chance to climb back into the match. This season, she has been telling herself to take the initiative, embracing the idea that if she doesn’t, she will probably lose.

Still, there is so much new for her, even here in Madrid, where it all started. This is the first tournament where she has defended significant rankings points. If she didn’t make it as far as she did last year, she would have dropped farther away from puppy ownership.

She got as high as No 33 in February and is currently No 43. She said the pressure of repeating what she had done last year in Madrid weighed on her as the tournament approached.

Then she looked at it from another perspective: Aryna Sabalenka, the defending champion, had to defend a title. All Andreeva had to do was defend three rounds. This is life at the higher end of professional tennis.

“It’s going to happen every year,” she said. “You cannot run from this.”

She has won four matches and made her first quarter-final in a tournament of this stature. Not that she is resting on her laurels. She said she allows herself to enjoy her victories for “about five minutes”. Then she starts thinking about the next match.

After Monday’s rollercoaster win over Paolini, in which she stole that first set then nearly coughed up a 5-2 lead in the second before winning 6-4, she found Martinez on the couch in a lounge. Martinez told her she was exhausted from the nerves of the afternoon. Her hands had been shaking. She was so tired she could barely get up.

This was all a big hoot to Andreeva. Sometimes she’s down and has to come back; sometimes she’s up and things get tight. Tennis doesn’t bring a ton of stability, just problems to solve. The swings are to be embraced, not avoided.

She may have another problem to solve soon enough: deciding on a dog. For the record, her mother was against the idea — but then Andreeva made her listen to her friend and fellow Russian, Anna Kalinskaya, who has traveled with her Pomsky, Kobe, and explained to Raisa how a pup has special soothing powers after tough matches and could calm the nerves ahead of them. Raisa was sold… kind of.

Andreeva wants a co*cker spaniel but knows they’re too big to tote around. She also is determined to adopt a puppy from a shelter.

So many things to think about. This is what happens when you get old.

(Top photo: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

Matthew Futterman is an award-winning veteran sports journalist and the author of two books, “Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed” and “Players: How Sports Became a Business.”Before coming to The Athletic in 2023, he worked for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Star-Ledger of New Jersey and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is currently writing a book about tennis, "The Cruelest Game: Agony, Ecstasy and Near Death Experiences on the Pro Tennis Tour," to be published by Doubleday in 2026. Follow Matthew on Twitter @mattfutterman