Sport is a high-wire walk — Exhilarating but fraught with falls

Competitive sport is akin to a high-wire walk. Everyone fears falling. Rivals jostle you like the wind. And challenges arise just as suddenly as the wire rotates underfoot. In the beginning, just getting on the wire in public is awkward, for it's hard to find nerve and balance even as someone is trying to shove you off.

- Rohit Brijnath Assistant Sports Editor

Yet when an unknown competitor finds their feet, as Alexandra Eala abruptly did at the Miami Open, it is startling. Even to her. After she wins her third-round match she cries, bounds, skips, laughs, runs, waves, kisses, hugs. It doesn't matter how many times you see joy in sport, it feels like a new dawn. Something miraculous seems under way.

It's Monday and news has come from the Philippines that even non-tennis fans are following Eala. She's 19, unknown, a wild card to the Miami Open and she's beaten Jelena Ostapenko, the 2017 French Open champion, and Madison Keys, reigning Australian Open champion, and has taken Philippine tennis to places it's never been.

Eala, daughter of a 1985 SEA Games swimming bronze medallist, is among a battalion of kids at the Rafael Nadal academy who are chasing dreams and there's no guarantee hers will materialise. Till against Keys it does.

"I am just in disbelief," she says.