Sharada Iyer — Tennis With An Accent
In Rome, former Australian Open winner Sofia Kenin upset the reigning Australian Open champion, Aryna Sabalenka, in the second round. The win reignited the conversation around Kenin, whose form and health suffered since she won her first and only major in 2020. The bigger story, though, was Sabalenka’s defeat, which echoed emphatically.
That it did, however, offered a big-picture note: It emphasized how potently dominant the 25-year-old has been this season, across all five months.
Not including Rome, Sabalenka had played seven tournaments this year. Of these, she reached the finals in five and won three, the most that any women’s player has achieved this year. Meanwhile, in the two tournaments where she didn’t make the finals – the Dubai Open and Miami – Sabalenka lost in the quarterfinals.
Thus, to put things into perspective about the shock surrounding her early departure in Rome, it was the first event this year in which she failed to win a match. The result provided a talking point for her prospects at the French Open, currently underway in Paris.
Sabalenka’s best result in Paris is the third round. She’s made it that far for three consecutive years now, beginning in 2020. On all three occasions, Sabalenka’s matches went the distance before she ended up getting the short end of the stick in the deciding set.
In 2020, seeded eighth, she lost to Ons Jabeur 6-3 in the third. In 2021, as the third seed, she lost to eventual finalist, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, after losing the third 6-0. In 2022, seeded seventh, she led Camila Giorgi by a set before the Italian pocketed the win, handing Sabalenka her second straight 6-0 defeat in the French capital.
Heading into Roland Garros this year, backed and bolstered by her consistent results, Sabalenka’s chances to make a deep run looked promising: Note the past tense. That’s where the Rome upset struck the hardest, making it quite an inconvenient blip at quite an inopportune time. We will see this week how well Sabalenka has recovered from this one loss.
As the world’s second-best player, with stacked numbers and figures by her side, Sabalenka will have heavy expectations riding on her in France, but if her performances this year are to be taken into context yet again, Sabalenka’s shown that she’s not only a player who evolves year-on-year but also someone who evolves match-after-match. She definitely doesn’t shy away from a challenge, regardless of how previous results might have shaped up to be.
This self-belief-backed attitude helped Aryna Sabalenka take on Iga Swiatek in the Mutua Madrid Open final and hand the World No. 1 a loss in the immediate week following her loss to the Pole in the Stuttgart Open final.
Sabalenka will need to call upon that belief in Paris if she wants to affirm her consistency at the highest levels of women’s tennis. She is into the third round, but now we get to see if she can transcend even more.
She has done a lot of it in 2023, but great players aren’t satisfied with five months of breakthroughs. Carrying out a full season of excellence is the next frontier for the World No. 2.
There is, after all, a higher number in the world rankings than two.
Tennis with an Accent 