By Martin Cleary
Happy anniversary, Gabriela Dabrowski.
Way back when Dabrowski was a mere seven years old, she picked up a tennis racquet for the first time and travelled to the Russel Boyd Park in Blossom Park with a visiting friend.
That was 25 tennis seasons ago, but it was the seed that allowed a young girl looking for some fresh air and recreation to innocently start down the path to become one of the best tennis players in the world.
According to a casual observer in the park that day, she hit the ball well for a beginner and he wondered where she took lessons. Sorry, no lessons.
But that comment sparked an interest in tennis, which triggered lessons and steady development, which produced titles and championships, which brought her to this point a quarter century later as one of Canada’s greatest players on the court.
Dabrowski trained with her dad Yurek for many years and had a rich and rewarding junior career. She won the prestigious 2006 Les Petits As world tournament for players 14 years and under as well as the 2009 Orange Bowl 18-and-under girls’ singles title. Dabrowski also reached the 2010 Australian Open junior women’s doubles final with Timea Babos.
Since turning professional at 19, she has been a formidable fixture on the Women’s Tennis Association tour for the past dozen years.
While the discipline of singles tennis grabs the majority of attention in the pro ranks, Dabrowski has made her name in doubles – currently ranked a career-high No. 3 in the world for women’s doubles with 17 titles, a trophy winner in three Grand Slams (two in mixed, one in women’s), the 2024 WTA Finals women’s doubles champion and winner of almost $5.6 million in career earnings.
While she loves to promote the doubles game and encourage TV networks for more coverage, she is still intrigued by the singles game.
The 2024 WTA season ended in early November and it would be fair to say Dabrowski experienced her greatest season ever at age 32. And she did that while missing the entire clay-court season, the French Open included, because of an unspecified injury.
She became the first Canadian woman to win a season-ending WTA Finals championship, claiming the women’s doubles title with Erin Routliffe of New Zealand. Playing in three Grand Slams in 2024, she was dependable and productive, reaching the Wimbledon final, the Australian Open semifinals and the U.S. Open quarterfinals, a year after winning that title.
Reaching the U.S. Open quarters was remarkable in itself, given the path Dabrowski travelled to get there. In the month before the U.S. Open, she reached the Wimbledon final in London, competed in two events at her third Summer Olympic Games and won the mixed doubles bronze medal with Felix Auger-Aliassime in Paris, and was a women’s doubles finalist at the National Bank Canadian Open in Toronto.
Those three major championships left her sick and exhausted as she worked hard to support Routliffe and represent herself and her country well on the road and at home.
Read More: Gaby Dabrowski enjoys ‘incredible’ Olympic medal win, gets sick with 3 big tourneys in a month
Dabrowski’s remarkable 2024 season was more than recognized by Tennis Canada this week and almost honoured in the same fashion by the WTA in its season-ending awards.
Not only did Dabrowski win Tennis Canada’s women’s doubles player-of-the-year award for a 12th consecutive season, but also she was named its women’s player of the year for the first time. It may be unprecedented that a female tennis player has won both awards in the same year.
Italy’s Sara Errani and Jasmine Paolini, the 2024 Olympic champions and French Open finalists, were named the WTA women’s doubles team of the year. But Dabrowski and Routliffe certainly presented a solid case for the award.
Dabrowski and Routliffe posted a win-loss record of 39-14 this season and won two titles – WTA Finals in November and the Nottingham Open in June. As a team, they were second in the season-long race to qualify for the WTA Finals (top eight teams). After winning their WTA Finals championship in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, they finished with the most points in 2024.
In the individual rankings for WTA women’s doubles players, Routliffe was second and Dabrowski took third, while Errani and Paolini were ninth and 10th respectively. Besides being quarterfinalists or better in three Grand Slams, which was a personal-best effort for Dabrowski, they also achieved the same result in four of seven WTA 1000 tournaments (the highest level). Dabrowski missed two WTA 1000 tournaments because of injury, including the French Open.
Dabrowski started 2024 ranked No. 8 in women’s doubles before she climbed to No. 5 in early February and March and to fourth in April and May. An injury kept her sidelined in the spring and her ranking slipped to seventh in June, but rose to fourth in July. For four of the final five months of the year, she was ranked a best-ever No. 3, starting in early August.
The fourth-seeded Dabrowski and Routliffe opened the 2024 season reaching the Australian Open women’s doubles semifinals in Melbourne. In mixed doubles, Dabrowski and Nathaniel Lammons reached the quarterfinals. The tournament and city are personal favourites for Dabrowski.
They also were finalists at the Miami Open and the National Bank Canadian Open, which are both WTA 1000 tournaments, as well as Wimbledon, where Dabrowski and Routliffe lost to Katerina Siniakova and Taylor Townsend 7-6 (7-5), 7-6 (7-1).
At the Paris Summer Games, Dabrowski and Auger-Aliassime stormed to the mixed doubles bronze medal, which was Canada’s first Olympic podium appearance since Daniel Nestor and Sebastien Lareau won the men’s doubles gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Games. Competing in her third Olympics, Dabrowski defeated Demi Schuurs and Wesley Koolhof of The Netherlands 6-3, 7-5 in the bronze medal match with Auger-Aliassime to become Canada’s first female Olympic tennis medallist.
Read More: Gaby Dabrowski enjoys ‘incredible’ Olympic medal win, gets sick with 3 big tourneys in a month
After experiencing the elation of winning her first WTA Finals title, Dabrowski flew to Malaga, Spain, to help Canada defend the Billie Jean King Cup, which it won for the first time in 2023. But top-seeded Canada lost two singles matches and was quickly eliminated 2-0 by Great Britain in the quarterfinals of the team championship. Dabrowski could only watch from the bench because she wasn’t required to play a doubles match.
“There’s definitely a lot of gratefulness that I feel for still being able to play at a high level, play with a great partner and have a great support team around us,” Dabrowski told WTA Insider Courtney Nguyen after the WTA Finals.
“It’s not easy to find that in our sport. So overall, it’s that enjoyment of the moment which has now come more consistently and more naturally than it has before.”
Will Dabrowski consider chasing a fourth Olympics for Canada?
“Four years is a long time,” she told the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Jackson Starr in August. “Now, I’m 32, so I would be 36. I don’t know if it’s in the cards for me to play for that long, but if I’m healthy and if I’m still enjoying it, absolutely, the Olympics will be something that I aim to qualify for.”
Happy anniversary, Gabriela Dabrowski.
Martin Cleary has written about amateur sports for 51 years. A past Canadian sportswriter of the year and Ottawa Sports Awards Lifetime Achievement in Sport Media honouree, Martin retired from full-time work at the Ottawa Citizen in 2012, but continued to write a bi-weekly “High Achievers” column for the Citizen/Sun.
When the pandemic struck, Martin created the High Achievers “Stay-Safe Edition” to provide some positive news during tough times, via his Twitter account at first and now here at OttawaSportsPages.ca.
Martin can be reached by e-mail at martincleary51@gmail.com and on Twitter @martincleary.
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