Osaka joined a chorus of praise from fellow players towards Townsend during this year’s US Open when the American was subject to a verbal tirade from Jelena Ostapenko following their second-round match—Ostapenko declaring Townsend had “no class” and “no education.”
“I know Taylor and I know how hard she’s worked and I know how smart she is,” Osaka said in a post-match press conference that week, “so she’s the furthest thing from uneducated or anything like that.”
Townsend went on to finish runner-up in the US Open women’s doubles event and qualify for her first WTA Finals, partnering world No. 1 Katerina Siniakova to go undefeated in round-robin play before falling in the finals to No. 2 seeds Gabriela Dabrowski and Erin Routliffe.
“I really feel like the type of tennis that I played and just the way that the person and the player that I am now really gained a lot of respect in the locker room amongst my counterparts,” Townsend said of her season in New York.
“Even Novak [Djokovic] said something to me. Jannik [Sinner] said something to me. Like, ‘Hey, like, you played really well, keep going, keep going.’ Everyone was watching. Even sometimes when you think, oh, nobody is, like, whatever, but they’re watching. For them to actually go out of their way to comment something to me, it means everything.”
