Kristina Mladenovic's résumé on the doubles court is a headhunter’s dream. Her work experience includes over 15 years as a professional tennis player, and her achievements include nine Grand Slam titles, seven other appearances in major finals, and back-to-back WTA Finals championships. For good measure, she’s also a former Top 10 player in the world in singles.
Her references, available upon request, would read as a who’s-who of tennis stars that include fellow Grand Slam champions and possible future Hall of Famers.
However, for most of 2024, 31-year-old Mladenovic had found the job market in doubles pretty barren. That was, until one potential employer picked up the phone, set up an interview, and gave Mladenovic the chance she was searching for.
And on Friday, Mladenovic, who barely needed any on-the-job training, has one more opportunity to win employee of the month in Flushing Meadows.
The new partnership of Mladenovic and Zhang Shuai has navigated its way through the women’s doubles draw as an unseeded pairing, making it to the final, where the two will play the team of Lyudmyla Kichenok and Jelena Ostapenko, the No. 7 seeds in Flushing Meadows. In the semifinals, Mladenovic and Zhang battled to a three-set victory over the Wimbledon champions, No. 3 seeds Katerina Siniakova and Taylor Townsend. This came after they beat No. 2 seeds Elise Mertens and Hsieh Su-Wei in Round 1, and No. 5 seeds Ellen Perez and Nicole Melichar-Martinez in the quarterfinals.
“The road to the final was just challenging matches, and right now, I just feel super proud of the job we have done really with my partner,” Mladenovic said to USOpen.org. “It was great tennis from day one actually, every single match, and yeah, what can I say? ... There's one big one to go.”
Mladenovic and Zhang, a two-time Grand Slam champion who won the 2021 US Open women’s doubles title alongside Samantha Stosur, are unseeded in large part to the former’s decision to concentrate on her singles career over the past couple of years. In doing so, her doubles ranking plummeted, making it harder for her and any potential new partner—especially one without a high-enough ranking of her own to offset Mladenovic’s—to gain entry into tournaments. In early January, Mladenovic’s doubles ranking was No. 85, the lowest it had been since the May 23, 2022 ranking that saw her No. 232, right before the start of that year’s Roland Garros.
Similar to what has transpired over these past couple of weeks, Mladenovic was also given a wild card to compete at Roland Garros in 2022, alongside one of her longtime partners, Caroline Garcia, and the French pair went on to win their second title in Paris together after defeating Americans Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula in the final.
“It feels surreal honestly to be part of this journey and career, with ups and downs, and I cannot believe I gave myself this opportunity to still chase for amazing titles."
Even with her pedigree, Mladenovic’s ranking (she has also struggled in singles, and is currently ranked outside the Top 200 there) acted as a bit of an albatross, and excluding the Grand Slams (where she teamed with Garcia for both the Australian Open and Wimbledon, both times unseeded), she’s only been able to participate in one tour event above WTA 125 level since the end of February. According to Mladenovic, that acted as a deterrent to potential partners wanting to join forces and, if those players did decide to team up, a not-so-friendly draw would surely await.
“Tennis at the end of the day is business. I didn’t play for some time, my ranking drops when [I] don’t play much, don’t play every week,” Mladenovic said. “And players just look at business basically. They want rankings, they want to be seeded, which, of course, makes life easier, right? Like us, this tournament, we are not a seed and we played the second seed [in the] first round.”
Enter Zhang, who is co-starring with Mladenovic in New York. The Chinese also experienced a steep drop in her doubles ranking this year while coming back from injury, and she ranked below Mladenovic, at No. 63, when the two first linked up to play in Toronto early last month.
Zhang’s own struggle to find a partner, as well the many occasions she and Mladenovic shared the court as opponents in both singles and doubles, made it easy for both to treat each other’s ranking like many view one’s age: it’s just a number.
“It was definitely not easy to find [a] player that respects you and also has the same motivation, the same goal and same energy and fighting spirit. That was definitely key,” Mladenovic said. “I’m super proud we found each other. We played many times against each other. I respect her a lot as a player. I know how tough she is. I never liked playing against her, so it’s good to have her on my side now.”
It has been 11 years since Mladenovic won her first Grand Slam title, the 2013 Wimbledon mixed doubles crown while playing alongside Daniel Nestor, and a victory on Friday would put the Frenchwoman in rarefied air with 10 career major doubles titles. It also will complete the Grand Slam championship set, as the US Open is the only major that she has yet to lift a trophy.
“It feels surreal honestly to be part of this journey and career, with ups and downs, and I cannot believe I gave myself this opportunity to still chase for amazing titles,” Mladenovic said. “We are talking Grand Slams, so this is something I'm definitely not taking for granted … This is still what drives me, [these] dreams. I made two finals here. I didn't win those ones, so that would be just unbelievable to take the US Open trophy.”
