Six years after she won the junior girl’s singles tournament at the Australian Open, Clara Tauson reached the biggest milestone of her career so far when she reached the WTA 1000 final of the Dubai Duty Free Championships on Saturday. Quite an accomplishment for a player who has lived most of her tennis life in the shadow of Caroline Wozniacki, Denmark’s former World No 1 and while she may have entered the championships last week largely unknown for an international sports audience, Tauson is quickly becoming a household name on the WTA Tour.
After having beaten World No 1, Aryna Sabalenka, on her way to the final and becoming the most successful player on the WTA Tour so far in 2025, the days where the niece of former ATP player Michael Tauson (who reached a career best ranking of 101) could sneak under the radar, are forever gone.
Opta statistics will back up the fact that Tauson has had a tremendous start to the beginning of the year. She holds the record for most aces this year (137), nobody has served as many aces in one match as her (26 against Sofia Kenin) and nobody has produced as many winners as her (482). 2021 was so far her best season with 19 wins so far, but this year alone she has already recorded 15 wins, more than any other player on the WTA Tour.
Tauson says herself that she is currently harvesting the fruit of a six-week intense fitness program where she intensified her schedule with long daily runs and hard training sessions on and off the court.
“Earlier in my career I did not put in enough physical work in relation to how many matches you have to play. You lose a lot of strength during a season, so I have worked on strengthening my base but of course also to get faster and more enduring”, says Clara Tauson who also stresses that it wasn’t only a matter of training more but training more wisely.
“I’m a bigger individual and my tennis is very powerful, so we realised that I wasn’t doing any good by training six hours a day. We turned the volume down a bit, but the intensity became a lot higher. That’s been very important.”
After winning the Junior’s Australian Open at the age of 16 and coming through qualifying and beating America’s No. 25 seed Jennifer Brady in her Grand Slam debut at the French Open in September 2020, Danish media upped the expectations that there was another Wozniacki on the way.
And the expectations certainly didn’t decrease after she won her first WTA title in Lyon as a qualifier in February 2021, having just turned 18. At the same time she entered the world’s top 100, becoming the youngest player in that group after Coco Gauff.
But then problems began to rise as Tauson suffered a knee injury soon after and the following year a back problem hampered her progress as she plummeted from No. 33 in February 2022 to No. 140 eight months later in the WTA rankings.
This forced her into a return to ITF events, which ranges below the WTA Tour and her physical problems also meant that her for an extended period of time she basically had no income. This meant that she was forced to end the cooperation with Belgian coach Olivier Jeunehomme when his contract ran out in December 2022.
"As a professional tennis player, it works like this that if you don't play tournaments, you don't earn any money. We are talking zero dollars. And less prize money also means less sponsorship funds, as many sponsorships are linked to playing the biggest tournaments. Reaching the first round of Grand Slam tournament can basically save a whole year”, said her dad Søren Tauson to bt.dk in January 2023.
Many of the world's best tennis players live on a daily basis in either Monaco, Dubai or Switzerland, where the tax burden is much lower than it is in Denmark. But Clara Tauson chose to move back home in 2023.
"We pay a lot of tax in Denmark, but I also love our society. So, I wouldn't trade that for anything else. I just have to keep winning, and then I probably won't think about my finances," she said back then.
One of the biggest reasons for Tauson´s uprising in the rankings has undoubtedly been her decision to part company with Holger Rune’s current coach, Lars Christensen, after the two of them fell out when Tauson lost in the second round of the US Open last year to Diana Shnaider. After the game Christensen chose to speak to the Danish media of the frustrations he encountered during the match.
"These are small corrections that she receives from the outside, which she chooses not to implement - or it doesn't work for her. I think it could have made a difference. It was a bit annoying. Things were not tried to the extent I had hoped for”, said Lars Christensen to which Tauson responded:
“I was under quite a lot of pressure, so I didn't hear everything, Lars said. I don't know exactly what he wants me to do. There were many things in my head, but perhaps I chose to disregard instructions”, she said.
Instead she launched a cooperation with boyfriend Kasper Elsvad in a parallel to Madison Keys being coached by her husband Bjorn Fratangelo. And the partnership has worked wonders with Tauson adding much more stability to her performances, perhaps especially from her backhand, which was previously also identified as one of her weaknesses from Flashscore tennis expert and former WTA Player, Katerina Teruzzi.
While Wozniacki was primarily a pusher but a great mover, it now remains to be seen whether Tauson's more aggressive style of play could be the key to turning her into the next Danish World No 1. Judging from her performance in Dubai it certainly would be a mistake to rule it out.