Elena Rybakina could not walk without pain when she landed in New York. A week and a half later she was holding the US Open trophy.
The 27-year-old from Kazakhstan beat two-time defending champion Aryna Sabalenka 6-4, 5-7, 6-2 in Saturday’s final, the same opponent she had beaten at the Australian Open in January. It is her third Grand Slam title. “Some magic is happening,” she said, clutching the trophy that night.
A foot injury and a plan
She aggravated the foot in her Cincinnati quarter-final against Iga Swiatek last month, a little over a week before the year’s last major began. An MRI in New York “didn’t look that great,” she said. “I was so upset. I didn’t know actually how it was going to be day by day. I couldn’t even walk for the next few days without pain.”
Help came from a long way off. “I was lucky enough to have a very good doctor in Australia,” Rybakina said. “She was on the phone with us all the time and somehow, with the team, we made a plan.” Playing on risked her season, but the top ranking was within reach and she wanted the final slam.
She did no on-court training for a week. Daily gym recovery sessions filled the time, along with dinners out and trips to the cinema to “switch the mind.”
The run to the final
Her first four matches went without a lost set, among them a win over four-time major winner Naomi Osaka. Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen fell in the quarter-finals, and third seed Coco Gauff in the semi-finals. By reaching that round she had already secured the world number one ranking, which made her opponent in the final the very player she would replace.
The final began with her biggest weapon misfiring. Rybakina landed only 27% of her first serves in the opening set, yet won 22 of 30 points on her serve and never faced a break point. Sabalenka broke in the 12th game of the second set to force a decider. Then Rybakina took over, while the Belarusian grew visibly more frustrated.
The nerves came late. She served two double faults with the title on her racket. At 40-30 she answered with her 12th ace of the match. Her celebration, a smile and both arms in the air, was the biggest of her three major wins.
Former British number one Annabel Croft, speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live, said: “The way she quietly walks around, she doesn’t really lift her head up and she gives no emotion away whatsoever. Rybakina is like a machine out there. You never know what’s going on in her head.” Croft thinks she has “the right personality to deal with” the ranking. On Monday Rybakina becomes the 30th different woman to hold number one, taking it from Sabalenka, who had held it for 99 weeks. Croft added: “It’s not going to be easy to hang on to it.”
One slam missing
Rybakina has now won two of her three Grand Slam finals against Sabalenka, all on hard courts. After Wimbledon in 2022 she waited until this January’s Australian Open for her second major. Only the French Open is missing from the career set. She has never gone past the quarter-finals at Roland Garros, though she won a WTA 1,000 event on clay in Rome in 2023.
Former British number one Laura Robson, on Sky Sports, called her “an all-surface player” and said: “I genuinely think she will win many more Slams.”
