There is so much to be jubilant about after her surreal US grand slam win. Yes, she didn’t drop a set and won the tournament after having come through qualifiers but beyond that; she’s a woman, she’s young, has a diverse heritage, and heralds from Bromley in the UK. Her story has been so very ordinary to this point. But her future looks set to be the polar opposite.

Wealth aside, despite the fact pundits are tipping her to be Britain’s first billion-dollar sportsperson, Emma will face challenges of unbelievable proportions that have nothing to do with wealth, and everything to do with expectation.

Let me back up a bit…

There are countless articles about Emma’s heritage. Born in Canada to a Romanian father and a Chinese mother, Britain became her home from the age of two. Oh, and she speaks Mandarin.

However, there’s an underlying rhetoric bubbling away that sits uncomfortably with me, and I imagine many others. It feels too familiar. I know we’ve been here before and it’s why the excitement of her extraordinary win also leaves me with a shiver.

It’s almost as if we’re all blindly playing into a reductive narrative that immigrants are welcome, so long as they’re winning grand slams, scoring goals for England at the Euros or inventing the next cure for cancer. That just ‘being’ and ‘bettering’ themselves and their families isn’t enough. 

That working a hard 9 to 5 job, servicing the NHS or contributing to business isn’t enough. It appears these families and individuals need to prove their value on unbelievably elevated ground to be ‘accepted’ and applauded as one of us. A true Brit.

We’ve been here before…young stars like Bukayo Saka who was racially abused alongside Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho when he missed a penalty at the Euros but lauded when he scored and delivered an assist for England in the World Cup qualifiers. Or stars like Naomi Osaka who’s Haitian-Japanese heritage made her a lucrative target for brands after her stunning performance on the world stage; however, her rapid rise to fame brought about mental health concerns which she was then publicly berated for.

Fine if you’re strong and willing, but show an ounce of weakness, or worse still, lose, then the nationalistic jingoism kicks in.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen cartoon figures like Nigel Farage say despicable things about immigrants – he’s said outright that Romanians are more likely to be criminals and he prefers Indians to Poles because ‘they abide by the law’. And yet he feels totally comfortable celebrating the success of Emma Raducanu (complete with her Romanian father) on Twitter. Safe to say he faced a Twitter takedown after doing so.

‘When it suits me, it’s fine’ is the type of divisive narrative we need to swerve on immigration in Britain and I hope we learn to execute this manoeuvre with almighty precision. Otherwise, it’s another case of build them up, only to take sport in their demise.