3 days ago
Ratings for Victoria Mboko's win help restore some lustre to Sportsnet's coverage
Sportsnet pulled in a record number of viewers for Victoria Mboko's thrilling victory over Naomi Osaka in the National Bank Open championship last Thursday night, ending the tournament on a high note after criticism of its coverage during the first week of the competition.
The network announced the women's final attracted an average audience of 638,000 viewers according to the ratings agency Numeris, making the broadcast its most-watched tennis program ever.
The previous high-water mark for Sportsnet's tennis coverage came during the 2019 final of the same tournament, then known as the Rogers Cup, when an average of 594,000 viewers watched Bianca Andreescu win the championship in a 19-minute match after Serena Williams retired early because of back spasms.
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This year's strong ratings helped to restore some lustre to Sportsnet after viewers pilloried the network for a string of unusual programming decisions. Though the tournament expanded this year from seven to 12 days, Sportsnet used the generic ATP world feed coverage of the men in Toronto, and the WTA world feed coverage of the women in Montreal, for the first six days rather than produce its own broadcast.
Analysts and play-by-play commentators during those broadcasts frequently seemed to have scant knowledge of the Canadian players they were discussing or the local interests.
After Eugenie Bouchard won her first match, the courtside WTA reporter conducted an interview exclusively in French, denying English-language Sportsnet viewers the chance to hear from her during her last triumphant moment. And, on the night that the Canadian star Felix Auger-Aliassime was eliminated from the tournament, Sportsnet instead broadcast a match featuring two European players.
By the time Sportsnet began its own original broadcasts, Mboko was the only Canadian player still standing.
If history is any indication, Mboko could pull in even more eye-popping numbers if she is able to continue her string of victories. Less than one month after winning the Rogers Cup in 2019, Andreescu's victory over Williams for that year's US Open championship attracted an average audience of 3.4-million viewers on TSN and RDS, making it the most-watched tennis broadcast ever on those networks.
