Who can turn lying on a hospital gurney into a photo op? Emma Raducanu can, of course – beaming as she showed off her bandaged wrist and arm, in a photo of such quality it didn’t look like it was snapped by a passing nurse’s iPhone. It left me with a renewed sense of foreboding about Raducanu’s future in tennis.

The tennis prodigy, who won the US Open two years ago, is super–talented and a wonderful athlete, but her 10,000 hours of practice must be receding into the background. That is the amount of time, Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book Outliers, that in the upper realms of excellence marks out the consistently high achiever. It applies no matter who you are, Gladwell writes: neither Mozart nor the chess great Bobby Fischer would have made it without putting in those hours.

A friend’s 11-year-old granddaughter said to me: ‘I remember Raducanu saying she hasn’t been able to practise physically but she was mentally prepared.’ What use will mental preparation on a hospital bed be on a circuit dominated by ferociously hard-hitting alpha females who want to stick it to someone they are starting to imagine is just another flaky Brit who got lucky in the Big Apple? No matter how jolly Aryna Sabalenka is said to be, it is hard to suppose that the hugely talented Belarussian, who has just notched up another big title on clay in Madrid, would be willing to go easy on the young Brit when she makes progress in a future tournament. If she ever does.

If not, I am sure Raducanu will soon appear as a knowledgeable and charming pundit for the BBC at Wimbledon, where she will become a national treasure in no time. The Princess of Wales is probably already lining her up to front a campaign to get young mothers and toddlers active by playing tennis.

Or she might be like Justin Rose and after a mighty start spend years in the doldrums before becoming a world-beater again. I do hope so. But there are real danger signs that her career is in peril. Remember two other outstanding juniors: Anna Kournikova, who reached the singles semi-final at her first Wimbledon in 1997, and more recently Britain’s Laura Robson? They were both forced out of the game by injuries before they had a chance to fulfil their promise. The parallels between Kournikova and Raducanu are striking, not only because they were both injury-prone but also because of their (understandable) enthusiasm for pursuing every opportunity to make money away from tennis.

It is hard not to compare Raducanu’s plight with Andy Murray’s remarkable mini-renaissance in the south of France this week. If anybody embodies the idea that nothing can be achieved without relentless toil and commitment, it is the extraordinary Scot. By all accounts, what he has put himself through in the gym and on the treatment table throughout his career has been truly unrelenting, but we shouldn’t get too excited about his winning a Challenger event – even though he does seem to be permanently driven by a howling gale.

French club rugby is in boisterous health, which is more than can be said for England’s. The on-field offering of the Gallagher premiership can be pretty spectacular, but without any real jeopardy interest starts to fade. On the final day of the season, all that was at stake was whether Bristol or Bath might hit the final eighth position to qualify for next year’s European Cup contests. In the event Bath, who have played some terrible rugby this season, just snuck in ahead on points difference after walloping a Saracens 2nd team. Of course Sarries can field who they like – and it was still a pretty good XV – but if I were a Bristol fan, I might feel a bit aggrieved.