From a teenage prodigy to a tour stalwart with “gnarly” injuries, Madison Keys’ road to Grand Slam glory has been long and complicated.

The newly-crowned Australian Open champion broke through on the WTA Tour when she was just 14 and was instantly tipped as a future major winner.

Now, a few weeks before her 30th birthday, the American has finally achieved her goal.

Keys capped an impressive run at Melbourne Park with a shock win over two-time defending champion Aryna Sabalenka in Saturday’s final.

“From a pretty young age, I felt like if I never won a Grand Slam then I wouldn’t have lived up to what people thought I should have been,” Keys said.

“That was a pretty heavy burden to carry around.”

Keys’ journey to the Melbourne title has not been easy.

In April 2009, aged 14 years and 48 days, she became the youngest player since Martina Hingis in 1994 to win a Tour-level match.

Six years later she reached the Australian Open semi-finals before going a step further at the 2017 US Open.

But Keys froze in her first major final. She won just three games against Sloane Stephens in a match she thought of “endlessly for the past eight years”.

Although she has reached five other major semi-finals since, Keys has battled injury problems and dropped out of the world’s top 50 in 2022

“I had to go through some tough things,” said Keys, who will now rise to seventh in the world.

“It forced me to look at myself in the mirror and try to work on the internal pressure I was putting on myself.

“I finally got to the point where I was proud of myself and my career, with or without a Grand Slam.

“I feel like letting go of that kind of internal talk gave me the ability to go out and play some really good tennis.”