'I travelled to Europe for the first time at 9 to a 12 and under tournament. I found it incredibly exciting, I knew I wanted to do this. I know nine is very young to decide what you want to do in life but that is pretty much when I decided.'
She bursts out laughing again: 'Meanwhile my twin retired at age six. We are very close but opposite in many ways. I never needed to be pushed.'
It is also clear that Bouchard is, like a surprising number of high achieving tennis players, formidably smart: 'I loved school. I would have to miss it for tennis and then I would start to do it online. I loved maths and science, maybe I would have ended up a doctor.
The steeliness to her character is evident, and while few outside observers believed she would progress so rapidly from 2012 onwards, she sounds like she expected it.
'To me it doesn't seem so drastic because I'm always trying to get better. We have a short career, it's not like you can let the years go by and wait for things to happen. It's a small window of opportunity so it seems completely normal.
