On Saturday night, Aryna Sabalenka finished off a historically dominant run to defend last year’s Australian Open triumph, defeating Qinwen Zheng 6-3 6-2 in 1 hour and 16 minutes. Her dominance in Melbourne this year can be demonstrated using two numbers: 8:11 and 3.99.
8:11: Aryna Sabalenka was on court for 8 hours and 11 minutes over her 7-match run, for an average of 1 hour and 10 minutes per match. She made quick work of Zheng in the final, but it was actually 6 minutes longer than her average match. The very low time on court shows that she was never in any trouble, winning every set she played and only losing more than 3 games in a set twice (both against Coco Gauff). It also shows the contrast between her play and that of the favorite from the other half of the draw – across her run of just 3 matches, Iga Swiatek played just 46 minutes less than Sabalenka did over the entire tournament.
3.99: Sabalenka’s CFOE rating over the full tournament was historically high. It was the second-highest rating of the main draw, only to Elina Svitolina’s 4.07, a dominant run ended by an unfortunate Round of 16 back injury. In fact, their ratings were the two highest in the main draw of a hard-court Grand Slam since Emma Raducanu ran through the 2021 US Open and the highest in Melbourne in at least a decade.
But this was not always the reality for Aryna Sabalenka. I started following her career closely during her Round of 16 loss to Serena Williams at the 2021 Australian Open. Since then, her career has gone through multiple transitions to get to this point. For many of them, you can point to a single match that flipped a switch in her head or perfectly encapsulates the moment. Let’s go through some of those matches.
2021 Wimbledon Round of 16: def (18) Elena Rybakina 6-3 4-6 6-3
Up to this point in her career, Aryna Sabalenka had been able to do plenty of damage outside of the Grand Slams, and she came into the All-England Club as the #2 seed. Below the Grand Slam level, she had made major breakthroughs, winning multiple 1000-level tournaments and the 2019 WTA Elite Trophy. She was even a 2-time Grand Slam doubles champion, alongside partner Elise Mertens. But she had never made the quarterfinals of the singles draw of a Grand Slam. At Wimbledon 2021, that all changed.
Like her previous two Round of 16 appearances, losses at the 2018 US Open to Naomi Osaka and the 2021 Australian Open to Serena Williams, this match went 3 sets. But from 3-3 in the final set, Sabalenka’s game hit the stratosphere, reeling off the final 12 points to smash her way into her first career Grand Slam quarterfinal. After the match, she said, “In the last game when I was up 30-love I was… almost crying because… I was a few points from my first personal goal in the Grand Slams.”
After this match, it was like she pulled down a wall in her head. Including Wimbledon 2021, Sabalenka has played in 10 Grand Slams since then. She has reached 8 quarterfinals, winning all of them, the second-longest streak of consecutive Grand Slam quarterfinal wins to start a career. This includes what is now 6 consecutive Grand Slam semifinal appearances.
2022 Australian Open Round of 16: l. Kaia Kanepi 5-7 6-2 6-7(7)
Aryna Sabalenka’s time in Australia in 2022 was catastrophic. She came into the season off of two consecutive Grand Slam semifinal runs. She was not a world beater at the time, and she was still prone to the occasional massive upset loss, but by no means was she playing bad tennis. She came into 2022 with the initial plan to play the first tournament of the year in Adelaide and then move over to Melbourne for the Australian Open. Then, she hit the court in Adelaide. In the first set against Kaja Juvan, she managed to go up a break twice, but she was unable to put the set away. Then, she was unable to find the court with her serve. She would hit 4 double faults in the tiebreaker and 11 in the 2nd set to lose 7-6 6-1, with 18 total double faults.
After that performance, she stuck around in Adelaide for the second tournament there. This time, her first match was against Rebecca Peterson. She won the first set, but she still just could not find the court with her serve. She hit 21 double faults, and things got bad enough that she started feeding the ball into the box at times. She came into the Australian Open broken, both technically and emotionally.
In Melbourne, she managed to squeak through three-setters against Storm Hunter, Wang Xinyu, and Marketa Vondrousova before her Round of 16 encounter with Kanepi. This loss epitomizes everything that was going on with Aryna Sabalenka at that time. She was not a particularly great mover, had difficulty managing her mentality and emotions in tight spots, and just could not land a serve, double faulting 15 times to run her tally for the Australian summer to 95 in just 6 matches. Her serve continued to struggle throughout the year – there is a certain word that begins with a y that is appropriate but has a tendency to return when uttered – but from here, her return of serve improved. After the Middle East swing, she refused the resignation of her coach, Anton Dubrov, and the inability to make any kind of serve allowed her and her team to be open to bringing in a biomechanist in the latter part of the season to help her figure something out.
2022 US Open Round 2: def Kaia Kanepi 2-6 7-6(8) 6-4
The next time Sabalenka faced Kanepi would be at the US Open the same year. At this point, the serve was still largely broken but on the mend, and she was starting to play better tennis. After dropping the first set, the second set was on its way out of hand, with Kanepi up to breaks and Sabalenka serving down 5-1. After fighting her way back on serve, she held out a tight game to hold for 6-5. After Kanepi held, we were into a tiebreaker. Sabalenka went down 5-2 in the tiebreaker, and all looked lost again. Sabalenka held both her service points, and Kanepi double faulted to bring the tiebreaker back even.
A few points later, with Kaia Kanepi serving at 7-6, Aryna Sabalenka hit the shot that may just have saved her career. A short return from Sabalenka brought Kanepi up to the net, but she recycled her approach shot right back down the middle. From around the baseline on Sabalenka’s side of the court, the reply looked like it would either go into the net or lead to an easy putaway volley, leading to another disappointing early-round Grand Slam defeat. Instead, the ball clipped the tape, skipped over Kanepi’s racket, and landed a few feet inside the baseline, giving Sabalenka life. She would go on to take that tiebreaker 10-8 and come alive in high-leverage situations, grabbing the 3rd set 6-4.
Aryna Sabalenka did not play particularly well in this match. But with this comeback, everything turned around. She has not lost a match before the semifinal of a Grand Slam since – including at Roland Garros, where her third-round losses were starting to pile up. But this match also revealed an issue for Sabalenka: she has a lot of trouble with specific players. Kanepi, Amanda Anisimova, Ons Jabeur, Coco Gauff, Karolina Muchova, and Iga Swiatek are among the players whose styles have given Sabalenka a lot of trouble. But this win over Kanepi seems to have given Aryna Sabalenka some hope, some energy, and a history to fall back on.
2022 US Open Quarterfinal: def (22) Karolina Pliskova 6-1 7-6(4)
Our next turning point happened just a few days later. This was Sabalenka’s third Grand Slam quarterfinal, a rematch of her first Grand Slam semifinal at Wimbledon 2021 in which she could not gain any traction on the Pliskova serve and lost in 3 sets. Sabalenka was dominant in the first set, securing 3 breaks and winning 6-1. But while Pliskova never had a break point during the match, Sabalenka could not find a way to break in the second set, and we arrived at Aryna Sabalenka’s next problem area: tiebreakers.
To that point, she was known to collapse, or at the very least give away a few easy points on her serve, in big moments. Issues on serve in big points are significantly magnified in tiebreakers, where every point the server loses is called a “mini-break.” But in the second-set tiebreaker, something felt different. Sabalenka pulled ahead with a mini-break of her own on the second point of the tiebreaker and gave it back on the fourth point. But she got right back after it, taking each of the next three points to go up 5-2 on her own serve. She immediately gave one of the mini-breaks right back, but she came right back and blasted a forehand winner up the line for 6-3. Then, at 6-4, she hit a beautiful, lunging forehand return winner to close out the match. The tiebreaker was good, but it looked like her demeanor in big spots was changing. To that point, she had been 26-24 in tiebreakers since the start of the 2018 season. Since the beginning of that tiebreaker, she is 16-7, according to Tennis Abstract. Sabalenka is still not perfect in big spots, as we will show later through her semifinal curse, but the second-set tiebreaker against Karolina Pliskova in what was otherwise a fairly straightforward victory showed a real change in her mentality.
2023 Australian Open Final: def (22) Elena Rybakina 4-6 6-3 6-4
This match was hard court tennis at its very best: two players absolutely bludgeoning the ball at the very highest levels. In an odd turn of events, 3 of the 5 breaks of serve happened on that player’s first service game with new balls. But this was Aryna Sabalenka’s first Grand Slam final, against the defending Wimbledon champion who was at the very top of her game and kept each set close. This had all the hallmarks of a match that the old Aryna Sabalenka would have lost. But she didn’t. Elena Rybakina made life extremely difficult for her all the way to the end. Sabalenka going 3/13 on break points, alongside a CFOE rating of -0.02, shows a player who saw a huge number of opportunities go by the wayside and just kept battling back to finally win her first Grand Slam. After the horrible inconsistency, serving woes, the history of falling apart right at the end, and all the tears, she had finally earned the right to drop to the court behind the baseline of Rod Laver Arena and cry tears of joy.
2023 US Open Semifinal: def (17) Madison Keys 0-6 7-6(1) 7-6(5)
Despite her title in Melbourne, Aryna Sabalenka’s Grand Slam semifinal woes returned. This was her 7th career Grand Slam semifinal. The previous 6 went as follows:
· Wimbledon 2021 vs Karolina Pliskova: l. 5-7 6-4 6-4
· US Open 2021 vs Leylah Fernandez: l. 7-6(3) 4-6 6-4
· US Open 2022 vs Iga Swiatek: Up a break twice in the 3rd set, l. 3-6 6-1 6-4
· Australian Open 2023 vs Magda Linette: w. 7-6(1) 6-2
· Wimbledon 2023 vs Ons Jabeur: Led by a set and 4-2, l. 6-7(5) 6-4 6-3
· Roland Garros 2023 vs Karolina Muchova: Led 5-2 in the 3rd set, l. 7-6(5) 6-7(5) 7-5
Aryna Sabalenka’s mean CFOE rating in the first five rounds of Grand Slams is 2.16. After the quarterfinals, the level and ability to control high-leverage moments plummets, dropping her CFOE to -0.68. That is a significant indicator of her 1-5 record in Grand Slam semifinals to this point. In the first set, it looked like more of the same. Keys grabbed the first set 6-0, went up a break in the second set, and even served for the match. Aryna Sabalenka threw rackets, yelled at her box, and looked like she had nothing to offer Madison Keys on that day in New York. But then, she started clawing Keys back. From 3-5 15-all, she reeled off 11 points in a row to take a 6-5 advantage in the set. After squandering 2 set points in the following service game, Sabalenka used what she had gained the previous year against Pliskova and ran away with the tiebreaker, 7-1. All of a sudden, from nothing, Aryna Sabalenka was back to even – and in a Grand Slam semifinal of all rounds. Then, she went back down a break in the 3rd set but took it right back in the next game. The two did not give each other much trouble on serve through the rest of the set, and now, it was time for a final set tiebreaker. If ever “Semifinal Sabs” were going to return, now would be the time.
The first four points of the super tiebreaker all went Sabalenka’s way, and from there, she could not be reeled in, winning the tiebreaker 10-5 after a bit of a false start when she celebrated at 7-3, thinking she had won. Sabalenka may have lost the final from a very advantageous position, with her win probability getting up as high as 89% in the first game of the second set, but her semifinal woes seem to have taken a definite turn with her victory over Madison Keys.
That was evident in this year’s Australian Open semifinal against Coco Gauff. Gauff really only had one chance to make a significant dent in the scoreboard. Sabalenka squandered two consecutive breaks to go down a break at 6-5 in the first set. Gauff started the next game at 30-0, but in the next two points, a deep Sabalenka forehand return created a bad mishit from Gauff, and then Gauff had her one real opportunity: a forehand that was low but shorter in the court that she missed in the net. From there, Aryna Sabalenka shut the match down. She went on the attack at 30-all and 30-40 to grab the break back, raced out to a 4-0 lead in the tiebreaker, and finished it at 7-2. Then, Gauff never even had another look at a Sabalenka service game until 0-30 in the eighth game of the second set, which Sabalenka swatted away with a second serve that opened up the court beautifully, a close point in which she hung around before finishing the first shorter ball that she saw, a vicious attacking point where she moved Gauff all over the court before finishing with a crosscourt forehand winner, and a deep backhand serve +1 that ran through the court and forced an error. From there, she took advantage of her fifth break point of the set and served out a tense final game. In all, the difference in Excitement Average between the two servers was a massive .1, meaning that there was very little pressure on the Sabalenka serve and extreme pressure on Gauff’s, and Sabalenka finished with an incredible CFOE rating of 3.77 to move herself to 3-5 in Grand Slam semifinals and secure her right to compete for a defense of her title.
Conclusion
Aryna Sabalenka was historically dominant at the 2024 Australian Open. That did not take just two weeks of work. Over three years of heartbreaks and breakthroughs – and that’s just the on-court situation – she and her team built her into the type of person who could have the highest CFOE rating of any player in our dataset to complete a match in the 2nd week of an Australian Open.
Sabalenka’s response to the challenging start to the 2022 season left her with a second serve that is a reliable weapon, with only 10 double faults in the tournament. Using lessons from her wins over Rybakina and Kanepi, Sabalenka managed to blow through Amanda Anisimova in the Round of 16. Using a confidence that became evident in her tiebreaker against Pliskova, she managed her emotions well and won a dominant tiebreaker when the score got close against Coco Gauff. Learning from her semifinal against Madison Keys and leaning on her victory over Kanepi, she held serve quickly and comfortably and piled the pressure on Gauff in the second set. And she used the confidence and experience of a Grand Slam champion to overpower the competition, to the tune of just 31 games lost in 7 matches. Aryna Sabalenka’s development is nowhere near finished, but that was impressive on so many levels.
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