Sabalenka

From 'alarming' sight to Aus Open champ: How star banished demons in 'comeback of century'

I realised that nobody other than me will help,” she explained to reporters this week. I’m still screaming ‘C’mon!’ and all that stuff, just less negative emotions.” Sabalenka faced break points in all of her service games against Vekic, saving a remarkable 12 of the 14 she faced, more proof of the huge difference from a year ago. The combination means she can now get herself out of a crisis, as she did when losing the first set of the final and in digging herself out of a hole in her semi-final against Magda Linette. But the shaky serve that has haunted her so badly in the past was rock-solid on her run to a maiden Grand Slam crown. She was reduced to tears on court at a tournament in the lead-up to last year’s Australian Open.

Aryna Sabalenka lies on the court during the women's final round match at the 2023 Australian. After winning the final match, against Elena Rybakina, with fifty ...

Her march to the Australian Open final had been important—a confirmation that Rybakina was one of the best players in the world, that her Wimbledon win was not a fluke. Sabalenka hit a thunderous overhead from a tricky position, the middle of the court, to take the break. She won the match on her third championship point, finishing with fifty-one winners to twenty-eight unforced errors, an astonishing ratio. She had to learn, she said, to fix her own problems on the court. She finished the year with more than four hundred double faults, more than a hundred more than the player with the second most. Rybakina came into the match as the twenty-second seed (and with the early outer-court assignments to match it). Her backhand seems chiselled to the essential motion and polished to smoothness, the way a sculpture can suggest the flow of water. And when the second set of the final began, and the pressure rose, she seemed to embrace it, and started to apply it herself. She had discovered, last year, that the problem was in her mind—but not only in the way one would imagine for a player with the yips. In the third game of the match, after firing an ace to go up 40–0, she watched her lead slip away, gifting a break point to Elena Rybakina with a double fault, and then losing the game with a loose forehand. She has a tiger’s face tattooed on her forearm, and a big cat’s rippling musculature. After Sabalenka scratched the break back to level the set at 4–4, Rybakina coolly got another, to go up 5–4, and then served out the set at love.

The Belarusian, who beat Elena Rybakina to win her first Grand Slam title on Saturday, held the trophy in triumph while the war in Ukraine remained a brutal ...

However you present her on the scoreboard, it was a Belarus victory. “Missing the Wimbledon was really tough for me,” she said. Her performance on Saturday was incontrovertible proof that they had succeeded, with the help of a biomechanical expert but also Sabalenka’s own resilience. Born and raised in Russia, she switched allegiance to Kazakhstan in exchange for financial support in 2018. Rybakina overpowered Swiatek in the fourth round in Melbourne on her way to the final. “And all that really starts from the people I was surrounded with. 2, behind Iga Swiatek, who still has a large lead based on her terrific 2022 season but who has lost to Sabalenka and Rybakina in the last two significant tournaments. It was tennis reminiscent of the big-serving, high-velocity duels between Serena and Venus Williams. But for the most part, it was strength versus strength; straight-line power against straight-line power. “I would like to have a quieter life,” she said after the mixed doubles final. Swiatek, the Polish star who looked set to become a dominant No. Anything less would not have sufficed against Elena Rybakina in their gripping, corner-to-corner final that might have been better suited to a ring as the two six-footers exchanged big blows for two hours and 28 minutes.

Aryna Sabalenka tamed her nerves to blast her way to a maiden Grand Slam title at the Australian Open, with a 4-6 6-3 6-4 win over Kazakh 22nd seed Elena ...

It was an amazing two weeks for me and hopefully I'm going to have the same results and even better." "Hopefully we're going to have many more battles," she added. "The last game, of course I was a little bit nervous. With Russian and Belarusian players competing as individuals without national affiliation in Melbourne due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Sabalenka becomes the first neutral athlete to win a major. She double-faulted on one matchpoint and squandered two more to draw gasps from the crowd. It was like a preparation."

One point away from her first Grand Slam title, Aryna Sabalenka faulted. And then again.

“I really feel right now that I really needed those tough losses to kind of understand myself a little bit better. “I actually feel happy that I lost those matches, so right now I can be a different player and just a different Aryna, you know?” Capable of delivering aces, she also had a well-known problem with double-faulting, leading the tour in that category last year with nearly 400, including matches with more than 20. After much prodding from her group, she agreed to undergo an overhaul of her mechanics last August. At the end, when it mattered more than ever, Sabalenka was able to steady herself. “We’ve been through a lot of, I would say, downs last year,” said Sabalenka, who was appearing in her first major final and had been 0-3 in Slam semifinals until this week. I (kept) telling myself, like, ‘Nobody tells you that it’s going to be easy.’ You just have to work for it, work for it, ‘til the last point,” said Sabalenka, a 24-year-old from Belarus who is now 11-0 with two titles in 2023 and will rise to No. And so, as she wasted a second match point by flubbing a forehand, and a third by again missing another, Sabalenka did her best to stay calm, something she used to find quite difficult. “She was strong mentally, physically.” She hung in there until a fourth chance to close out Elena Rybakina presented itself — and this time, Sabalenka saw a forehand from her similarly powerful foe sail long. Clearly, this business of winning the Australian Open was not bound to happen without a bit of a struggle Saturday night. She also knew that all of the effort she put in, to overcome self-doubt and those dreaded double-faults, had to pay off eventually.

Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus holds the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Trophy aloft after defeating Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan in the women's singles final at the ...

A few games later, Sabalenka returned the favor, also putting her racket on one of Rybakina’s offerings at that same speed. Aggressively attacking, she broke to go up 3-1, held for 4-1 and eventually served it out, fittingly, with an ace – on a second serve, no less. This time, Sabalenka again turned toward her entourage, but with a sigh and an eye roll and arms extended, as if to say, “Can you believe it?” Sabalenka had been broken just six times in 55 service games through the course of these two weeks, an average of once per match. The key statistic, ultimately, was this: Sabalenka accumulated 13 break points, Rybakina seven. That, along with a commitment to trying to stay calm in the most high-pressure moments, is really paying off now.

The big-hitting Belarusian overhauled Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina in the final at Rod Laver Arena while barred from representing her country.

It's just about the hard work I've done." I live there right now," she said. "But I mean, I played the U.S. It's not about Wimbledon right now. Register for free to Reuters and know the full story [Russian and Belarusian flags](/lifestyle/sports/russian-flags-banned-australian-open-tennis-after-ukraine-complaint-2023-01-17/) to Melbourne Park on the second day of the tournament after a complaint from the Ukraine embassy in Australia.