Grand Expectations: The young, turbulent careers of Eugenie Bouchard and Grigor Dimitrov

It was late 2014, and TENNIS Magazine was planning its January/February issue. Traditionally, the year’s opening issue focused on the Australian Open, but this time we opted to go for a season-preview theme. With a change in course, there was some debate on how we were going to construct the magazine’s 60 editorial pages. But it was unanimous who would grace the most important page, the cover: Eugenie Bouchard.

The 20-year-old had taken tennis by storm earlier that year, starting at the Australian Open, where she reached the semifinals as the No. 30 seed. A “Genie Army” took notice of the starlet and invaded Melbourne—lofting teddy bears, rather than grenades, from the stands—and swelled in number as the Canadian went on to make her second Grand Slam semifinal at Roland Garros. She then topped both performances with a runner-up finish at Wimbledon.

“I was in a bubble,” Bouchard admitted to Tennis Channel on Tuesday at Roland Garros. “I didn’t realize what I was doing.”

Bouchard finally realized her accomplishments when she returned to Canada, where she was greeted by scores of cameras, media and fans at Montreal’s Trudeau Airport. From that point on, Bouchard's career was never the same. In her first match after the Wimbledon final, as the eighth seed and home favorite at the Rogers Cup in Montreal, she took a 6-0, 2-6, 6-0 loss to 113th-ranked qualifier Shelby Rogers. She’d lose her next match, in Cincinnati to Svetlana Kuznetsova. Bouchard would save face with sustained runs at the U.S. Open and Wuhan, and we chalked up her 0-3 mark at the WTA Finals to the grind of a long and successful season. Genie was our cover girl.

Bouchard went on to post a 12-18 mark in 2015, losing 15 of 18 matches in one stretch. She was no longer the happy-go-lucky, free-swinging, cheerful player we thought we knew. When she appeared to turn a corner at the U.S. Open, she slipped and fell in a dark locker room, forcing her to pull out of her fourth-round match with concussion symptoms.

“I don’t want to be asked ever again about 2015,” Bouchard told interviewers Jon Wertheim and Brett Haber with a smile.

Then her conversation took a more serious tone.

“I just felt so nervous that it was hard to eat before matches, and even sometimes at other meals,” she said. “It was just hard to keep [food] down. I didn’t try to lose weight, but it definitely happened. It was a cause of the stress.

“It was something I managed to get through, and I learned a lot from it. Now I know that I have to just force food down my throat, even if I feel sick. Because I’m burning too many calories.”

I don’t believe that Bouchard’s name—let alone a picture—appears anywhere in this year’s season preview issue. From No. 5 in the world in October 2014, Bouchard cascaded to No. 48 by the end of 2015. Fortunes can change quickly in any sport, but Bouchard’s precipitous fall was shocking for even seasoned fans to witness. But to no one more so than herself.

“I told myself to get my shit together,” Bouchard said, not pardoning her French. “I was like, ‘What are you doing? This is enough.’”

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Bouchard hasn’t just turned the page on 2015, she’s burned those pages to cinders. She already has more wins this year than last, and has reached two finals. Coming into Roland Garros, Bouchard defeated Australian Open champion Angelique Kerber in the Rome tune-up tournament. And her first match on the terre battue was a breeze, a 6-2, 6-2 dismissal of Laura Siegemund on distant Court 16.

“I thought it was hilarious when I saw I was playing on Court 16,” said Bouchard, tongue firmly in cheek. “My coaches, when they arrived at the match, they couldn’t even have a place to sit. I had friends as well who were stuck outside and couldn’t watch me play.

“I feel like it’s my first year on tour again. I try to see it as a positive thing.”

We did consider one other player for that 2015 season-preview cover, and it’s someone who might want to take Bouchard’s words to heart: Grigor Dimitrov. A day before Bouchard was beaming after her first-round win, Dimitrov was more downtrodden than ever. The 25-year-old Bulgarian, ranked as high as No. 8 in 2014, took a five-set loss to Viktor Troicki and admitted that he’s experiencing a crisis of confidence.

“I’ve been there before but this time it’s just kind of different,” Dimitrov told *Sport360*. “Sometimes it’s scary of course, it’s just really scary. But I’m positive and happy to come out and work and work and work, that never scares me.”

Dimitrov’s lengthy, introspective comments read like a therapy session—the topic of a sports psychologist was even raised. While Dimitrov’s 2016 season hasn’t dipped to the point of Bouchard’s 2015, they are similar in that the player appears unrecognizable to the one we once watched.

“I knew after his loss in Istanbul where he was serving for the match, he didn't play well,” said Troicki about Dimitrov. “I think he can play well on clay, but I knew his confidence is not very good right now.”

This was Dimitrov’s fourth consecutive defeat—and third straight first-round exit at Roland Garros—although it was his most competitive of the quartet. His dry spell began with a racquet-smashing meltdown in the Istanbul final, which he lost 6-7 (5), 7-6 (4), 6-0 to 87th-ranked Diego Schwartzman. He even denied Schwartzman the satisfaction of victory by forfeiting the final in the third set:

Bouchard, even if she hasn’t destroyed hundreds of dollars’ worth of racquets during a final, has been in Dimitrov’s position before. If she was his shrink, I think I know what she’d say, after an expletive or two: ‘What are you doing? This is enough.’