It’s a sticky morning just ahead of the start of Wimbledon and Harriet Dart — tennis ace, SW19 golden girl and the Brit currently pipped to overtake an injured Emma Raducanu in the women’s rankings — is doing her best to stay cool, despite the broken air conditioning.
The 26-year-old the British No.4 might not have a US Open win under her belt like Raducanu, 20, but after a decade in the game and her best season yet (reaching the final 16 at all three of the pre-Wimbledon warm-up tournaments in Birmingham, Nottingham and Eastbourne), she certainly relates to a lot of the US Open winner’s comments about the pressures of the tour and online trolling.
“As an athlete you’re your own worst critic anyway... Then, you know, ‘Paul’ is also telling you that you can’t play tennis,” she tells me, eye-rolling as she refers to the so-called keyboard warriors who slide into her direct messages on Instagram, where she has 35,000 followers and a glossy grid of action shots, snaps from travels or with her boyfriend Stephen Falck, and sponsored posts with brands from Asics to Vitamin Well.
The sprightly Gen-Zer admits she still suffers with imposter syndrome (“I’m a bit like ‘Ah, why are people coming to watch me?’”) and has long had insecurities about her skin (“I’ve had a pimple on my chin that is all I can see in every photo”), but she tries her hardest to ignore the trolls and refuses to edit her pictures — largely for the sake of the young girls who make up a lot her fan base and turn up to her matches to give her a high-five.
Still, the global attention can feel like a lot, at certain times. “It’s dog-eat-dog in this world and at the end of the day you’re trying to earn more money than you spend and expenses are super high. And you’re also doing all of that in front of the public...,” she says. “If you have a bad day in the office, most likely the worst situation you’re going to be in is your boss will know about it. In tennis, if you have a bad day at Wimbledon or the US Open or a big tournament, you’re on the front page; you’re in the headlines. I think that can be difficult because it’s not just yourself and your team that are judging you but also the whole world.”
In tennis, if you have a bad day at Wimbledon or the US Open, you’re on the front page
Thankfully for Dart, the next fortnight feels like a ripe time to be playing in front of the whole world, pimples or not. She is speaking to me shortly after reaching a second successive grass-court quarter-final at the Birmingham Classic, beating the same Ukrainian player, Anhelina Kalinina, she knocked out at the same stage of the Nottingham Open the previous week — a result she is delighted with after being dosed up on antibiotics for a bad bout of tonsilitus.
Dart is the only British player left in the tournament when we meet (she is knocked out of the quarter final by fourth seed Anastasia Potapova the following day), and goes on to reach the quarter final again at grass-court tournament the Eastbourne International five days later. “The crowds are always amazing... it’s unusual in the fact that the spectators can get so close to the players, they feel like they’re almost on the courts,” she says of the seaside tournament, her second favourite on the tour.
That proud British crowd is just a taster for what’s to come as Dart enters the real highlight of summer, Wimbledon, next week — a favourite for most British players but particularly for Dart, who lives just a five-minute walk from the All England Club in Southfields after growing up in Hampstead, north-west London. Her parents Susie and Nick — a teacher and chartered surveyor — were both tennis players who first met at Cumberland Lawn Tennis Club in Camden and Dart was a keen athlete from an early age, toying between tennis and running before she honed in on the racket sport.
Dart notes that she could’ve been training for Paris 2024 if she’d chosen the running path, but she certainly seems satisfied with her decision today. Smiling in a grey hoodie and apologising for the lines on her face from a sports massage, she comes across as relaxed and unflustered when it comes to questions about her private life, joking about perils of Instagram Reels and the importance of sending funny memes in long-distance relationships — a subject she spoke openly about this time last year after admitting to going through a “really bad personal time” back in 2021 thanks to a “very toxic” ex-relationship.
She is out of that relationship now and “a lot happier”, largely thanks to her “nice [new] boyfriend” Falck, a Norwegian model and software engineer who works as her agent and Dart has credited for improving her relaxed mental attitude both on and off-court. “It’s like any job, if you bring things from home into the workplace, it’s very challenging... I do believe if you’re happier off the court, you’re happier on the court,” she said ahead of Wimbledon last year.
Dart still stands by those words today, sharing regular happy glances with Falck, who is sitting just off-camera and she is lucky to have accompanying her on most of her trips away from the home they share in Southfields. “I have a great relationship off-court and a great network of friends and family who are super supportive and keep me on the straight and narow — that’s definitely helped me a lot more relaxed on the court,” she says.
“Transferring it to the normal workplace, that’s a big thing too. if you’ve had a bad morning with your other half, you’re probably not going to be as well equipped to be in a good frame of mind in the office, step into a big meeting, it’s the same for me going onto a tennis court. It’s important to somehow be able to separate it but also manage it at the same time.”
Dart is looking forward to sleeping in her own bed during Wimbledon. Her parents are “super supportive” and will come and watch when they can, as will her younger sister Phoebe, a politics graduate and keen Barry’s Bootcamp fan who currently works for an MP and lives with Dart and Falck in Southfields. A keen interior designer in her spare time, Dart has been enjoying doing up the house when she’s at home, and the trio spend their downtime cooking barbecues together and playing lego, another hobby of Dart’s that helps her to decrompress amid the training (she takes lego car models away on tour to build in the hotel room).
Dart has just finished building a State of Liberty model and is mid-way through a practice day with her coach Nigel Sears — Andy Murray’s father-in-law and one of Raducanu’s (growing list of) former trainers — when we sit down to talk about the Championships she grew up dreaming of winning as a young girl.
Our interview comes amid a string of headlines about tension within the British team: that there was beef between her and British No. 1 Katie Boulter after a tense handshake at the Nottingham Open two weeks ago; that the handshake speaks to a wider rift among the British women at the moment; and — in the days after our interview — that Raducanu’s US Open win “papered over the cracks” in British female tennis at the moment, according to men’s No. 2 Dan Evans.
Dart did speak out on this particular comment, insisting women’s tennis is in fact on the rise in the UK after being one of four to reach the quarter-finals in Nottingham for the first time in WTA history this month. The rest she is quick to dismiss, insisting she tries to avoid reading articles about herself (“my dad gets more annoyed [by them]”) and that she is lucky to have grown up with a good “crop” of British players of a similar age.
Half of the top 14 men and women — Dart, Boulter, Jodie Burrage, Katie Swan, Cameron Norrie, Jan Choinski and Ryan Peniston — are between the ages of 24 and 27 and “you’ve known these people since you were nine, ten-years-old, so it’s like we’ve gone through those school years [together], almost... Everyone is super friendly and we all mix really well, everyone’s quite similar.”
British No. 5 Heather Watson, 31, is probably Dart’s closest pal among the Brits, but she’s tight with all of them. And she’d rather not focus on the rumoured tensions within the team anyway (”I can’t control any of that, I can just control what I do on the court”), but those within tennis more broadly, like the duration of men’s versus women’s matches (“I never really get this argument... All I know is that whenever the schedule comes out I pray that I’m not playing after lots of men’s matches because you never know when you’re going to be on”) and the treatment of female players by the press and governing bodies — an issue she thinks is improving, slowly, but still has a long way to go.
“The way we might act in a press conference or on the court is seen very differently to our male contemporaries. We’ll get labelled emotional or weak or something. I still don’t think we’re taken seriously enough,” she says.
Dart welcomes the recent change in Wimbledon rules to allow female players to wear coloured underwear under their tennis whites, though she admits “it’s going to be weird now because if you are wearing coloured underwear people are just going to assume you’re on your period”.
What else would she like to see change for women? Dart says she’d love to see a women’s event at Queen’s, and for commentators to stop referring to female players as the “female GOAT [Greatest Of All Time]”. “They would never go ‘Oh, the male GOAT’... That’s one thing Andy [Murray] has been amazing at,” she says, referencing the two-time Wimbledon champion’s history of calling out reporters for sexist questions at press conferences.
Dart’s other gripe is about the disparity in the way male and female players are spoken after becoming a parent. “We have so many females in sport coming back after having a baby. It’s inspiring and just shows you can manage lots of things. But I always wonder why people don’t ask the man how they’re doing after having kids but are automatically like ‘Ooh, how are you coping as the mother?’ Surely in this day and age you’d think it would be more of an equal split.”
Dart hopes she’ll have a long time left in professional tennis, but she’s excited for retirement when it comes. She’d love to hone in on her interior design hobby — to “buy some properties and do them up, flip them” — and has “dabbled” in some commentary, which she’d like to explore more.
In the meantime, the focus is on having a deep run at Wimbledon and taking a short trip away with Falck before clawing her way back into the world top 100 rankings, which would put her back into main draw for big tournaments like the US Open. Just like any job, “it’s about day-to-day things I an control,” she says. Sleeping in her own bed during Wimbledon will have its downsides because ”you don’t feel like you’re in work mode”. The upside? She’ll have her lego — and be in control of the air conditioning.
