WASHINGTON, D.C. — Taylor Townsend was never given the luxury of a quiet rise. In 2012, at the age of 16, she was the junior world No. 1, an Australian Open champion and a Wimbledon doubles winner. But the praise quickly gave way to judgment.
She was the “it” girl of her tennis generation — until she wasn’t.
Townsend, who didn’t have the lean, sculpted look of so many other elite junior players, was barred from competing in the junior US Open and sent to its training center in Florida to focus on improving her fitness. Eventually, her USTA funding and support was revoked.
What are professional athletes supposed to look like? Townsend was an early test case in the highly uncomfortable setting of harsh public scrutiny.
“I have had to go through some of the hardest struggles and the most personal struggles in the public eye,” she told reporters here at the Mubadala Citi DC Open. “Some really very kind of intimate topics that had to be a topic of conversation literally around the world as a child and having to defend myself as a kid.
“It’s made me who I am, and it’s made me appreciate every step of the way, and being able to have somebody say, externally, ‘You look so happy playing,’ that’s a win.”
There was cause for joy on Friday when, 13 years after she reigned as the top junior, Townsend captured the No. 1 PIF WTA Ranking in doubles.
“It is a dream,” Townsend said. “It’s one of the goals that I set for myself when I actually began to think it was attainable.”
She and Zhang Shuai, playing together for the first time, advanced to the finals when the semifinal team of Emma Raducanu and Elena Rybakina — ER Squared as they’ve become known — retired after 25 minutes trailing 4-1. Both Raducanu and Rybakina are scheduled to play semifinal singles matches on Saturday.
The outcome ends Katerina Sinakova’s 46-week reign at No. 1. She and Townsend have been playing together since 2024, when they won titles at Wimbledon and the year-end WTA Tour championships. Back in January, they won the Australian Open title and followed it up at the WTA 1000 in Dubai.
When Siniakova chose to play singles at the Prague Open, Townsend approached Zhang, and the two won their first two matches. The 325 points for reaching the final puts Townsend ahead of Siniakova, who dropped last year’s 250 points that came from winning the Prague title with Barbora Krejcikova.
Townsend’s singles run ended Friday with a 6-4, 7-6 (4) loss to Leylah Fernandez. But earlier in the tournament, after beating No. 6 seed Sofia Kenin, Townsend presided over a sprawling, illuminating press conference.
“There hasn’t been anyone who has gone through what I went through since I went through it, so I think things have changed a little bit — which is great, right?” Townsend said. “When I was going through the whole body image thing, there was no body positivity movement. That didn’t exist.
“It was common to scrutinize body types and give a person a body archetype and what you should be and having to put people in this box. And now, throughout the years, it has evolved into shattering those boxes and basically people being able to accomplish whatever they want in their fields, however you look and whatever.”