Emma Raducanu might have hoped much of this was behind her.
When she was catapulted to fame in the summer of 2021, she attracted fervent global attention, but within a year, she had learned the darker side of fame, a stalker who visited her home on multiple occasions and stole possessions was sentenced to a five-year restraining order.
After another similar incident with an obsessed individual in Dubai, The i Paper spoke to security experts about the options available to high-profile athletes like Raducanu who want to continue living normal lives.
This latest horrifying ordeal began when Raducanu was approached by a man she recognised was displaying “fixated behaviour”, a technical term for someone showing obsessive and potentially dangerous traits, who also gave her a handwritten letter and took photos of her.
When he turned up again 24 hours during her second-round match in Dubai, she burst into tears of panic and fear.
“Fixation and ideation are two terms we use to describe this particular behaviour. And most times, what that results in is stalking,” Benjamin Alozie, an experienced international security advisor and director at Icon Global Risk Consulting, tells The i Paper.
“Most times, ideation and fixation may not be harmful until it becomes obsessive. When it becomes obsessive, then you start looking into it.
“When that individual is in our spaces or sending communications, that gets our attention, and then we have to start managing it.”
Alozie has worked protecting high-level politicians as well as those in the entertainment and sports spheres, across three different continents.
But the truth is that high-profile individuals tend to have similar threats and requirements across the board, and that Alozie has four key rings of security to adopt: deter, detect, delay and deny.
“The strategies and the tactics are the same, we will deploy it everywhere we go,” he adds.
“We will just need to adapt it to local cultures, local laws.
“How we secure a door here is the same way we secure a door anywhere. How we put that in a different space is where the art comes in, where we start finessing it.”
There are plans and systems in place within tennis, of course.
The WTA has a vice-president of security who is a former high-ranking secret service agent, and works closely with Theseus Risk Management, a company that specialises in dealing with fixated threats.
But increasingly athletes are employing their own security consultants to provide greater peace of mind, especially given the amount of international travel involved in sport.
When Raducanu returned to the UK on Wednesday, it was the first time she had touched down on home soil since before Christmas.
Travel is a non-negotiable in that sense, and is something that Raducanu actively enjoys, but may involve more planning and investment in security going forward.
It is, on the face of it, at odds with Raducanu’s new-found sense of Zen.
She has recently spoken of finding enjoyment in solo trips for a coffee on tour or just going on walks around the many cities she visits in the course of a season. She would be loathe to give that up in the name of security.
“Because of the way that profile goes up and down and around and about, your security is a big investment,” Umbra International chief executive Kate Bright tells The i Paper.
“I think it’s a brilliant investment, because you get a good return on your investment, but you might choose at certain times in your career when you’re not ‘in the public eye’ as much, you might dial it down.
“We’re not here in the business of saying, ‘Oh, Emma needs a female operator with her at all times for the rest of her life,’ but somewhere between nothing and that is probably where she’s going to land in the short term.
“I would hope that she has some really good advice around her, legally, digitally, reputationally, a protective sort of eye across it holistically, to make sure that the strategy isn’t just knee-jerk in the short term, and then everyone gets bored and then disbands, and then something happens again.
“But it’s actually something that can be really lifestyle appropriate. That’s going to give her a sense of peace of mind, rather than paranoia. That’s a really smart investment for anyone of her sort of level of of success.
“One of the things that I’ve had to help clients understand over the years, particularly when they’re in the public eye, is they can have entirely invisible security.”
It is also known as “silent security”, where protection is unseen but present.
The client, one source says, can easily forget it is even there until it is required.
It might also feature specific training given to people like Raducanu, who might be told how to recognise potential threats and what to do when they arise.
Bright says: “Our concept is called ‘secure lifestyle’. It looks at the person: it looks at their both their public persona, which often for sport, media entertainment clients, is in the public eye, and they want to also have a private life.
“What we’re seeing here is that intersection of the two, and it’s where some of the most technical holistic security strategy needs to be put in place, both proactively and also, in this case, sadly, reactively.
“It is much more prevalent for our female clients to have this sort of fixated behaviour.
“And for me, it’s very, very obvious that if more crimes are committed in public safety terms against women, it goes to figure that women in the public eye are going to have to think about things in a slightly different kind of way.
“It just means that when we’re then saying to a client, you can have invisible security, female operators, male operators, short, tall, blend-able, so that you’re not physically feeling like you’ve got protection, but then also you’ve got really elegant, digital and reputational security woven into that.”
Security, it seems, does not always have to be the stereotypical tall man in a suit with an earpiece.
Bright adds: “By the way, that can be a tactic, and that can be a very, very effective deterrent to someone that’s standing waiting in a queue and is gonna then jump in and do something silly.”
But a modern protection plan is much more than that. It knits together social media input from legal teams, cyber experts and even PR managers to create a complete picture of possible threats. The WTA already do some of this monitoring through Threat Matrix, a specialist service from by AI company Signify Group.
“If you’re not looking at the snapshot of your client’s life online in relation to their physical threat, you’re missing a trick,” Bright says.
“Online abuse is the tip of the iceberg that client will experience. There may be other things that need to be mapped in real time. So social media monitoring and sentiment analysis are important.”
What happened in Dubai is believed to have been almost unavoidable. There were only a few hours between authorities being notified of Monday’s incident and Raducanu heading to court for her match, leaving very little time for surveillance or intelligence, despite best efforts – although her former coach Roman Kelecic on Friday claimed photos of the man’s face had been circulated in advance of the match. Tournament sources have rejected that version of events.
Nevertheless, that is the level of intelligence and surveillance that any professional outfit would aspire to in protecting Raducanu.
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