Ben Shelton and Victoria Mboko got better with every round in Canada, and didn’t stop until they had their first 1000-level titles

It isn’t often that we see a top-level tennis player make improvements—noticeable improvements, undeniable improvements, eye-popping improvements—from one month to the next. Usually, the pros reach their peak at some point fairly early in their careers, and stay there for years, if not decades.

That’s one reason why this was such a rare and exciting week in the sport. We saw not one, but two, young pros—18-year-old Victoria Mboko of Canada, and 22-year-old Ben Shelton of the U.S.—get better before our eyes over the course of the 1000-level events in Montreal and Toronto. And we saw them keep getting better right up until the final points of their title runs on Thursday. Along the way, they took a pair of tournaments that began with a series of debilitating big-name withdrawals, and made them two of the most dramatic and enjoyable of the season so far.

That’s especially true, of course, of Mboko’s uber-Cinderella run in Montreal. Everything about it felt storybook. She’s a teenager. She was playing at home. She was a wild card. She was in her first WTA 1000 event. At the start of 2025, she was almost entirely unknown. And while she had shredded the ITF Circuit this season, she hadn’t played many top-tier main draws.

By the time the tournament was over, Mboko had wins over four Grand Slam champs—Sofia Kenin, Coco Gauff, Elena Rybakina and Naomi Osaka—and had jumped from No, 85 to No. 24. Much like her countrywoman Bianca Andreescu in Indian Wells six years ago, Mboko went from talented person to watch for in the future, to must-see TV and contender at every tournament she enters.

Mboko showed off a shot-making arsenal that was more powerful and reliable than it had been just a few short months ago. She led the tournament in aces, she traded blows with two of the WTA’s biggest hitters in Rybakina and Osaka, she ran down everything everyone threw at her, and she may have invented a new shot along the way—the inside-out backhand, smacked from the middle of the baseline for blazing winners that never failed to stun her opponents.

Most impressive, I thought, was the way Mboko handled slow starts and first-set deficits. Three times she lost an opening set badly to a higher-ranked player; three times she failed to show any prolonged negativity. Instead, she patiently tried to raise her level—her pace, her placement—to match and then surpass her opponent’s.

I liked her description of the mental approach that allows her to do that.

“When I kind of go into the match, I always think of sets as, like, checkpoints,” Mboko said. “So once I finish the first set, I completely put it behind me, and I start a new little chapter, I guess.”

“I kind of try to switch my mindset as much as possible and kind of switch up how I go about things when I’m playing the match. I think whenever I play the second set, I feel like I put a lot more emphasis in my movement and my defending skills and what I’m supposed to do on court, and I try to sharpen up and clean up a lot of my mistakes.”

As Mboko switched things up and grew in confidence in the second set, her more experienced opponent went in the opposite direction. Whether it was frustration at Mboko’s better play, her own inability to close, or the fan’s ear-splitting ovations for their compatriot, Osaka melted down and went hollow-eyed, as if she wanted to be anywhere else than in that stadium. She partially recovered in the third set, but by then Mboko wasn’t going to be caught. Osaka finished her best tournament in three years on a sour note, telling the crowd, “Thanks, I guess,” when they cheered her during the trophy presentation, and failing to congratulate Mboko, who had called Osaka her idol earlier in the week.

“This morning I was very grateful,” Osaka said later. “I don’t know why my emotions flipped so quickly, but I’m really happy to have played the final. I think Victoria played really well. I completely forgot to congratulate her on the court. Yeah, I mean, she did really amazing.”

Over the last few games of the final, in a kind of magical symbiosis, Mboko’s shots flew faster as the crowd’s roars are louder. But there was one shot that stood out as especially promising for her future.

Mboko was serving at 2-1 in the third set. She had already shown major signs of nerves in the second, when she started double faulting uncontrollably as soon as she gained the lead. Would it happen again in the third?

Mboko faced four break points at 2-1, but saved them all, mostly with big serves. Finally, at game point, she powered down another strong first serve, and followed it with the most delicately vicious of drop shots. Osaka couldn’t get within three feet of it, and she couldn’t win another game.

“At the end of the day I just did everything I possibly could to pull through the match, and thankfully I came out for the win,” Mboko said.

Shelton’s victory obviously wasn’t as dramatic, or as popular with the home folks, as Mboko’s. In fact, when the news that she had won reached Toronto, the crowd broke into an ovation so long and loud that Shelton and Karen Khachanov had to stop play and ask the chair umpire what was going on.

But if it wasn’t as fairytale as Mboko’s run, Shelton’s was every bit as important for the sport going forward—probably more so in the immediate future. A single-shot artist when he came up, Shelton possessed a more complete game than any of his opponents this week. He won tough matches—three of them in third-set tiebreakers—and he won matches going away, over Top 10 opponents Taylor Fritz and Alex de Minaur.

Two passages of play in the final stood out, and exemplified how finely honed Shelton’s competitive instincts have become.

The first came when he was down a set and serving at 3-4 in the second. At that moment, he looked destined to lose. Then, at 15-30, Shelton suddenly upped his energy level, threw in a well-timed drop shot, and finished the point with a crosscourt backhand winner. That combination of strokes kicked him into a higher gear. He held with a service winner, broke at 4-4 with a sharp series of ground strokes, and held for the set with another drop shot and a crosscourt pass.

The second difference-making passage came at the start of the third-set tiebreaker. Knowing how important the early points are in any breaker, Shelton jumped on Khachanov, first with with an unreturnable ground stroke, then with a service winner, and then with an ace. The match, in the blink of an eye, was his.

Shelton credited a mid-match decision to move up in the court, suggested by his father, Bryan, for his comeback.

“Karen was bullying me around the court,” Shelton said. “The way he was hitting his forehand, the way he was cutting off the court, the way he was serving, I felt like I had a freight train coming at me. It was uncomfortable to move forward. The ball was coming at me even faster. I started being able to redirect. Get some big shots of my own and flip the momentum of that match. That was huge for me.”

“It’s been a long week,” Shelton said, summing up what he sees as his promising form. “Not an easy path, not an easy week by any means. I was clutch, I was resilient, a lot of qualities that I like to see in myself.”

You don’t see many players get this much better, in this short amount of time, as Shelton and Mboko. Put Mboko in the Top 10 conversation. Put Shelton among the US Open contenders.