Aryna Sabalenka

The 24-year-old Belarusian player pushed Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan to three sets to capture her first Grand Slam singles title.

Two games from the championship and in the driver’s seat, Sabalenka pumped her fist, took a few deep breaths and mouthfuls of water on the changeover, then strutted back onto the court to hammer her way to the title. As the reigning Wimbledon champion playing against a first-time Grand Slam finalist, Rybakina held a priceless edge in experience, but Sabalenka had all of the momentum, and the balls were jumping off her strings with a pop and a zip that Rybakina couldn’t match. She was also asked to answer for her native country’s invasion of Ukraine as she stampeded to the title. On her third chance to get the crucial break of serve, Sabalenka sent her opponent scrambling after shots, then put away the game with an overhead shot from the middle of the court. Then, on Sabalenka’s fourth match point, Rybakina buckled, sending that forehand long, and an overwhelmed Sabalenka flat onto her back. On Thursday, after finally making her first Grand Slam final on her fourth try, Sabalenka talked about having fired her sports psychologist. Rybakina, a Russian through her childhood who became a citizen of Kazakhstan when the country promised to pay for her tennis training, spent the better part of two weeks during Wimbledon talking about whether she was actually Kazakh or Russian. They were first and second in hitting winners off their opponents’ serve, and at the top of the charts in peak serve speed, with both cracking 120 miles per hour. It was Sabalenka’s first Grand Slam title in a rocky career that has included the kind of error-ridden, big-moment meltdowns from which some players almost never recover. The year’s first Grand Slam event runs from Jan. On the final, anxious point, Rybakina sent a forehand long. “We’ve been through a lot of downs,” she said.

Aryna Sabalenka, the fifth seed from Belarus, roared back powerfully to win 4-6, 6-3, 6-4 and take her first grand slam singles title.

On Saturday, she relied heavily on her serve to hold on in the tight final games. On Monday, she will rise to No 10 in the rankings from her current position of 25th, breaking the top 10 for the first time in her career at last. On her fourth match point, Sabalenka forced a final forehand error from Rybakina, and collapsed to the ground as a grand slam champion at last. Her victory is a validation of the perseverance and toil it has taken to improve both her mentality and game. She hired a psychologist, who helped her manage her emotions, before recently deciding to hold herself accountable. With her considerably heavier ball – her ability to combine pace and spin, unlike Rybakina’s flatter ball – alongside her greater athleticism, Sabalenka knew that she had the edge over Rybakina in any neutral rally. Sabalenka remains unbeaten in 2023, winning her first 11 matches of the season with two titles to her name. She spent her time in Adelaide throwing in underarm serves because she simply could not serve. Throughout the supreme winning run she has compiled to start this season, Aryna Sabalenka continually stressed that her mentality has shifted. Neither player shied away from the pressure of such a significant moment and they produced exquisite shotmaking from the beginning. Sabalenka, who hails from Belarus, is the first neutral athlete to win a singles grand slam tournament since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She is more composed now, willing to work for her opportunities instead of swinging thoughtlessly for the fences.

Aryna Sabalenka won her first Grand Slam title by coming back to beat Elena Rybakina in the Australian Open women's final.

“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.” Clearly, this business of winning the Australian Open was not bound to happen without a bit of a struggle Saturday night. 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. She yelled and turned her back to the court.

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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.

Sabalenka, 24, was playing in her first Grand Slam singles final after breaking through following three semifinal appearances in the past two years.

“You just have to work for it and work for it to the end.” In 2022 Grand Slam matches in which Sabalenka lost the first set, she had gone 6-0: three wins at the Australian (where she reached the fourth round), one at the French (where she reached the third round) and two at the U.S. On a third championship point, 2 hours 26 minutes into the match, she shoved a backhand just long, but while she made the occasional gesture acknowledging her struggle — a slight smile, even — she won the battle with herself. She held at love at 5-4 for the first set — the first set Sabalenka had yielded among 21 this year — then tacked on more peril for Sabalenka by forging ahead 15-40 while returning serve in the first game of the second set. “She played unbelievable tennis,” the winner, Sabalenka, said of the other winner in the champion’s news conference in Melbourne, “and I fought so hard to win this one, and I think the tennis was great. Her service side stayed almost airtight with 17 aces and only one more break point faced until the harrowing final game. The match filled with the deuces of long, tight games — a 57-minute second set, a 57-minute third — its soundtrack the shrieks and grunts of Sabalenka against Rybakina’s noiseless power. “I think it’s more enjoyable, I would say, after all those tough matches,” she said. “Hopefully we’ll have more matches in the finals of Grand Slams,” Sabalenka told Rybakina on the court during the trophy ceremony. It began after a weird dearth of split-set matches at this tournament, with straight sets enough to decide six of eight fourth-round matches, all four quarterfinals and both semifinals. All 82 winners under pressure that seared back and forth across the Australian Open women’s final Saturday eventually seemed to identify just two winners: the players. It looked very much the player who will become No.

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.

Belarusian-born Aryna Sabalenka defeated Elena Rybakina in three sets to win a thrilling women's Australian Open final Saturday, becoming the first player ...

Aryna Sabalenka came from a set down and capitalized on 17 aces and a late overpowering stroke to defeat Elena Rybakina 4-6, 6-3, 6-4 and win her first ...

Sabalenka has won all 11 of the matches she’s played in 2023. 22 seed Rybakina, the reigning Wimbledon champion serving at 3-3 in the third set, Sabalenka turned up the heat on her opponent. Her 17 aces were the second most in a WTA Tour final since 2008. Rybakina, who represents Kazakhstan, will move into the Top 10 for the first time. When the new rankings come out on Monday, Sabalenka will move to No. She captured the championship in two hours, 28 minutes on her fourth match point when Rybakina’s forehand went long.

MELBOURNE, Australia—One point away from her first Grand Slam title, Aryna Sabalenka faulted. And then she faulted again. She grimaced.

“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. 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. “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. “She was strong mentally, physically.” She yelled and turned her back to the court. She hung in there until a fourth chance to close out [Elena Rybakina](https://apnews.com/article/wimbledon-sports-moscow-kazakhstan-venus-williams-eeec79c03f00550d3476baa22e2e273e) presented itself—and this time, Sabalenka saw a forehand from her similarly powerful foe sail long. She wiggled her shoulders and exhaled.

Look back at the three times Elena Rybakina and Aryna Sabalenka previously met ahead of their showdown at the Australian Open.

She had made the second week of a major for the first time in Paris and marked it with a statement win over Serena Williams to reach the quarterfinals. Rybakina was the only player to take a set from Sabalenka this week, in a match we called She had maintained her Abu Dhabi form through the first half of the season, winning the Madrid title and rising to a career-high of No.4. She had fallen in qualifying in 2019 to Varvara Flink (the tournament was not held in 2020). By contrast, Sabalenka was in the middle of a career-best 15-match winning streak. Though Rybakina was the first player to take a set off Sabalenka this week, Sabalenka pulled through and went on to successfully defend her title. The third set, I was trying to move her a little bit more, don't give her that much time, just move her from side to side a little bit quicker." By the start of 2021, Rybakina had established herself in the Top 20. [Australian Open final 411](https://www.wtatennis.com/news/3038649/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-australian-open-final) [Advantage Rybakina or Sabalenka?](https://www.wtatennis.com/news/3038811/advantage-rybakina-or-sabalenka-in-australian-open-final-) She had ended 2020 on a three-match losing streak but had righted the ship somewhat at the start of a new season to reach the inaugural Abu Dhabi quarterfinals. Sabalenka was the defending champion and searching to rediscover the previous year's form after a number of early-round losses over the summer.

The women's champion donned a lilac look by an Australian luxury fashion label, as she took her new trophy on a gondola ride at the botanical gardens in ...

“I like to pose, especially when you’re a Grand Slam champion,” she laughed. She matched the capped-sleeve blouse and skirt featuring delicate floral appliques with a pair of royal blue [Manolo Blahnik Hangisi](https://www.manoloblahnik.com/us/hangisi-16027.html) pumps. Social

The Belarusian claimed a 4-6 6-3 6-4 victory, becoming the first player to win a singles grand slam under a neutral flag.