Victoria Mboko and Janice Tjen end breakthrough tennis seasons with WTA Tour titles

Welcome back to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where The Athletic will explain the stories behind the stories from the past week on court.

This week, two rising WTA talents capped incredible seasons, the ATP Tour Race to Turin went to the last and a comeback year came to an end.

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How did two breakthrough players round off their seasons?

In winning WTA 250 tournaments last week, Victoria Mboko and Janice Tjen capped two of the most impressive rises on the women’s tour this year. Mboko defeated Cristina Bucşa 7-5, 6-7(9), 6-2 to lift the Hong Kong Tennis Open trophy, while Tjen defeated Kimberly Birrell 6-4, 6-3 to win the Chennai Open singles, before adding the women’s doubles title alongside compatriot Aldila Sutjiadi.

Mboko, 19, finished last year at No. 350, after managing her tournament load following a series of knee injuries. The Canadian finishes 2025 as the world No. 18, comfortably seeded for the four majors. All the more remarkable are the contours of her season: the 20 consecutive wins in the tennis minor leagues to start the year, the close losses to Paula Badosa and Coco Gauff at the Miami and Italian Opens, and the French Open third-round run through qualifying that announced her to the wider world, even as she had been shouting about her ability for over a year, just out of the spotlight.

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And then the trip to her home tournament, the WTA 1000 Canadian Open in Montreal, where she beat four Grand Slam champions in seven matches — including Gauff — to win the title. The four consecutive first-round defeats that followed it. And then a steadying run to the Pan Pacific Open quarterfinals in Tokyo, before this title in Hong Kong, which included a thrilling three-set comeback win against fellow riser Alexandra Eala of the Philippines.

Tjen, 23, went 15-4 through her first 19 matches of 2025, and then won 27 more in a row. When she came onto the main tour, the Indonesian, who played college tennis at Pepperdine in Los Angeles County, beat No. 24 seed Veronika Kudermetova at the U.S. Open before losing to Emma Raducanu. In her next tournament, her first WTA 250 at the São Paulo Open, she got to the final. She went down to WTA 125 (the equivalent of the ATP Challenger Tour) and won a title at that level. And then she came to Chennai and won again, taking her to world No. 53. She ended last year at world No. 521 and was unranked in June 2024.

Between them, Mboko and Tjen are 58-14 and 72-12 in 2025, racking up 130 wins to just 26 defeats. Some stardust, but two rises built on substance.

— James Hansen

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Where is the ATP Tour Race to Turin with a week to go — and why will a key rule change?

After the ATP Tour Race to Turin took over the Paris Masters, the final week of the regular season has much less drama at stake. Félix Auger-Aliassime is at No. 8, and the Canadian will qualify unless Lorenzo Musetti, No. 9, wins the Hellenic Championship in Athens. Also playing in Greece is Novak Djokovic, the seven-time ATP Tour Finals champion who is the wild card in all this.

The 38-year-old has already qualified, but if he decides to skip the event — as he did last year — then both Auger-Aliassime and Musetti will qualify.

Next year, there will be no mad dash at the ATP 250 tournaments. From 2026, the Paris Masters, the final ATP Masters 1000 of the year, will become the cutoff for points in the race for the ATP Tour Finals. At the end of the tournament, the eight players who have won the most points will be confirmed as qualified; points earned in the week between the end of the Paris Masters and the start of the ATP Tour Finals will count toward the following year's race.

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This is largely to prevent exactly what has happened the past few days: top players withdrawing from the 250s because their destinies in the race no longer hinge on them. Auger-Aliassime and Medvedev withdrew from the Moselle Open in Metz, France, the former due to physical issues even with his qualification not quite secure. Ending the count after the Paris Masters will also mean no disparity in preparation for the ATP Tour Finals. If Musetti does win the Hellenic Championship and qualifies this year, he will have at least an extra week of tennis in his legs on the rest of the field.

Next year, there will be no mad dash at the ATP 250 tournaments. From 2026, the Paris Masters, the final ATP Masters 1000 of the year, will become the cutoff for points in the race for the ATP Tour Finals. At the end of the tournament, the eight players who have won the most points will be confirmed as qualified; points earned in the week between the end of the Paris Masters and the start of the ATP Tour Finals will count toward the following year's race.

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This is largely to prevent exactly what has happened the past few days: top players withdrawing from the 250s because their destinies in the race no longer hinge on them. Auger-Aliassime and Medvedev withdrew from the Moselle Open in Metz, France, the former due to physical issues even with his qualification not quite secure. Ending the count after the Paris Masters will also mean no disparity in preparation for the ATP Tour Finals. If Musetti does win the Hellenic Championship and qualifies this year, he will have at least an extra week of tennis in his legs on the rest of the field.

— James Hansen

Why did a battle of single-handed backhands feel like the future, not the past?

In a year of breakthroughs for Loïs Boisson, Eala, Tjen and Mboko, another young player enjoyed what felt like a significant moment last week.

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By reaching the final of her first WTA event at the Jiangxi Open, Lilli Tagger, a 17-year-old from Austria, served notice to the wider tennis world of her considerable potential. Like Boisson, Tjen and Mboko, Tagger has enjoyed success on the third-tier ITF Women's World Tennis Tour this year — beating the former to win the final of one such event in March — and in June won the French Open girls’ event without dropping a set.

Tagger lost to Anna Blinkova 6-3, 6-3, but she has a powerful serve and baseline game, and an extremely rare (especially on the women’s side) single-handed backhand. It’s a shot that can break down for Tagger, but is also extremely effective at times, and the rarity of it will ensure that her game gets a great deal of attention. The last female player to win a Grand Slam with a single-handed backhand was Italy’s Francesca Schiavone at the 2010 French Open; now she is Tagger’s coach.

There are two players in the top 100 with a single-handed backhand, and one of those, Tatjana Maria, almost always plays a slice rather than hitting the kind of drive that tennis purists tend to imagine.

The other is Viktorija Golubic, who was Tagger’s opponent in the Jiangxi Open semifinal on Saturday. Tagger prevailed 6-1, 4-6, 7-5, before her loss to Blinkova in the final.

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And while it had become increasingly rare for players to make their mark as teenagers, this year has seen a bit of a shift. At the Australian Open in January, Mirra Andreeva was the only teenager in the WTA top 100. Since then, Mboko, Iva Jović and Maya Joint have all climbed into the world’s top 40, while Czech 18-year-old Tereza Valentová sits at No. 56 and her compatriot, Sara Bejlek, is ranked No. 75.

Tagger looks like joining them before too long.

— Charlie Eccleshare

How did a great comeback year end for Belinda Bencic?

In an interview last December, Belinda Bencic's confidence about her return to professional tennis was palpable. She had only been back playing a few weeks after the birth of her daughter Bella eight months earlier, but wasn’t putting limitations on what she could achieve in the next chapter of her career.

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“I’m really confident about getting back to where I was and even better,” she said via Zoom, having not competed between September 2023 and the end of October 2024.

In less than a year, Bencic has pretty much made good on that promise. After withdrawing because of injury before last week’s Hong Kong Tennis Open quarterfinal, she ended 2025 as the world No. 11, having won a 500-level title in Abu Dhabi and matched her best performance at a slam, by reaching the Wimbledon semifinals. In so doing, she has lifted her ranking by 478 places from No. 489 at the start of the year.

A former world No. 4 and Olympic champion, Bencic has returning to that kind of level in her sights. And after winning the WTA comeback player of the year in 2019, who would bet against her becoming just the fifth player to claim the accolade twice when the 2025 gongs are handed out?

— Charlie Eccleshare

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🏆 The winners of the week

🎾 ATP:

🏆 Jannik Sinner (2) def. Félix Auger-Aliassime (9) 6-4, 7-6(4) to win the Paris Masters (1,000) in Paris. It is the Italian's fifth title of the season.

🎾 WTA:

🏆 Victoria Mboko (3) def. Leylah Fernandez (2) 2-6, 6-3, 6-2 to win the Hong Kong Tennis Open (250) in Hong Kong. It is the Canadian's second WTA Tour title.

🏆 Anna Blinkova def. Lilli Tagger (WC) 6-3, 6-3 to win the Jiangxi Open (250) in Jiujiang, China. It is the Russian's second WTA Tour title.

🏆 Janice Tjen (4) def. Kimberly Birrell (7) 6-4, 6-3 to win the Chennai Open (250) in Chennai, India. It is the Indonesian's first WTA Tour title.

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📈📉 On the rise / Down the line

📈 Jannik Sinner moves up one place from No. 2 to No. 1 after winning the Paris Masters.

📈 Janice Tjen ascends 29 spots from No. 82 to No. 53, a career-high ranking.

📈 Lilli Tagger rises 80 places from No. 235 to No. 155, breaking the top 100 for the first time.

📉 Carlos Alcaraz falls one place from No. 1 to No. 2.

📉 Diana Shnaider drops out of the top 20, falling three places from No. 18 to No. 21.

📉 Stefanos Tsitsipas leaves the top 30, falling eight spots from No. 26 to No. 34.

📅 Coming up

🎾 ATP

📍Athens: Hellenic Championship (250) featuring Novak Djokovic, Karen Khachanov, Sebastian Korda, Ivan Ivanov.

📍Metz, France: Moselle Open (250) featuring Félix Auger-Aliassime, Alexander Bublik, Cameron Norrie, Learner Tien.

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📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel 💻 Tennis TV

🎾 WTA

📍Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: WTA Tour Finals featuring Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Świątek, Coco Gauff, Amanda Anisimova.

📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel

Tell us what you noticed this week in the comments below as the men's and women's tours continue.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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