'They want to be my best friend': Tagger no longer flying under radar
Having lifted silverware at the Roland Garros Junior Championships last month, Lilli Tagger is no longer an unknown quantity and she suddenly knows what it feels like to be a marked woman.
Tagger was something of a surprise contender to triumph on the clay courts of Paris, but she duly did so to become the first Austrian to win the girls’ singles at Roland Garros.
The 17-year-old was thrust to the forefront of the junior tennis world overnight as she rose 43 places to No. 4 in the ITF World Tennis Tour girls' rankings following her maiden Junior Grand Slam triumph.
Her rise should not have been a seismic shock, however, as the teenager conquered all before her at W35 Terrassa on the ITF World Tennis Tour in March to seal the first professional title of her career.
She entered Wimbledon bidding to become the first girl to win back-to-back Junior Grand Slams since Alina Korneeva in 2023, and the first to complete the Roland Garros-Wimbledon double since Belinda Bencic in 2013.
Tagger has made light work of it all so far and on Wednesday she advanced to the quarter-finals following a 6-3 6-2 victory over Great Britain’s Ruby Cooling. Normal service on court perhaps, but the teenager knows she no longer flies under the radar.
“After winning Roland Garros, I didn’t change a lot but other people, also the players, now they watch me – it’s different,” Tagger, who is currently ranked No. 3 in the ITF World Tennis Tour junior rankings, told itftennis.com.
“Maybe before they didn’t really care about me. Now they come to watch me, try to understand what I am doing and maybe are happy when I lose sometimes. That is something which has changed since Paris.
View this post on Instagram
“I remember after my final match there, I got a message from Dominic Thiem who wrote to congratulate me and I was really, really happy to get that message from him. I got a lot of messages, some from people I didn’t even know existed.
“And that is something important. The first week after Roland Garros, suddenly everyone wanted to be my best friend. Sometimes I was like, ‘I have never heard of you but now you want to be my best friend’. That’s been a difference outside of the court.
“It is important to understand who the are people who will stay with you, because suddenly everybody wants to be with you.”
This is not Tagger’s first Wimbledon, she contested the Junior Championships last year but crashed out in the first round following defeat to Tyra Caterina Grant of the United States having navigating qualifying.
She failed to fire at the 2024 US Open Junior Championships also but a run to the quarter-finals at the Australian Open in January kickstarted a Junior Gram Slam journey which, at the moment, shows no sign of slowing.
“I've played here before and came here for the first time last year,” said Tagger. “Normally, I watched it from home on television. At the beginning, I really couldn’t imagine playing here one day.
“Maybe when I started playing, I didn’t care that much about tennis and I was maybe on the mountains skiing. But when I was a bit older I decided to train more and try to become a professional player.
“To be honest, at the beginning maybe I didn’t really believe what I could do, but after a period I started to believe more and now I am super happy about what I can do with my life.”