The trajectory of Aryna Sabalenka’s season changed in late June, with an ache in her shoulder.
Wimbledon was fast approaching, and she hadn’t been able to serve or hit overheads without intense pain for days.
Could she swallow some painkillers, grit her teeth and fight her way through a few early matches at the most important tournament of the year? Maybe — but at what risk to the rest of her year in tennis, and to her desire to end that year at the top of the rankings?
At an impromptu gathering of her team in London, Sabalenka’s coach, Anton Dubrov, framed the conversation in these terms. “What can we do to make the maximum opportunity,” Dubrov recalled saying, during a recent interview from Beijing last month.
“What steps did they need to take to get her back to something close to 100 per cent?
No decision would guarantee future success. They had to accept that. Sabalenka, Dubrov, and the rest of the group with whom Sabalenka has emerged from some of the darkest places, in her tennis and in her personal life, needed to give her the best chance for the biggest rewards. Then they would have to take responsibility for that decision, by doing everything they could to prove that they had followed the right course. Only hindsight would reveal the pattern of the unknown.
Their meeting didn’t last very long. Within a few minutes, everyone agreed that, as much as it might hurt, Sabalenka would pull out of Wimbledon, Dubrov said. The way the last Grand Slam had ended, with Sabalenka losing to Mirra Andreeva in the French Open quarterfinals as she battled nausea from food poisoning, only sharpened the sting.
Two months later, Sabalenka would show up in New York for the U.S. Open feeling fresher, hungrier and healthier than she had since the start of the year. Two weeks after that, she collapsed to the ground on Arthur Ashe Stadium as U.S. Open champion, formalizing her battle for supremacy with world No. 1 Iga Swiatek in a cacophony of joy and relief.
One month after that in Wuhan, China, she beat Yulia Putintseva in three sets to forge ahead of Swiatek in the race for year-end world No. 1. She moved ahead in that race once before, 13 months ago, only to fumble it away in the final weeks of the season, when Swiatek regained the top spot with a storming run at last year’s WTA Tour Finals.
“The best feeling,” she said after winning the title in New York, the troubles of early summer still raw but so radically eased. “I really wish everyone could or can experience that.”
Now she wants to experience the feeling of finishing the year as the world No. 1.
It sounds so simple. If you’re hurt, get healthy. If you’re tired and worn down, take a break.
Take the long view, not the short one.
In the increasingly taxing and treacherous world of professional tennis, players so often don’t do what Sabalenka did.
Hubert Hurkacz and Alex de Minaur both left Wimbledon with what appeared to be significant injuries. Hurkacz tore his meniscus diving to win a point against Arthur Fils in the third round, retiring two points later and match point down after attempting to save a tiebreak on one leg.
Sliding out to a volley in the twilight of his fourth-round match against Fils, De Minaur suffered a cartilage tear in his right hip. He grimaced through two more points, converting the second before looking to his box with the eyes of a player who knows they should not hit another ball. He withdrew from his quarterfinal against Novak Djokovic on the morning of that match.
Both players were competing again a month later, hobbling through matches. In late August a few days before the start of the U.S. Open, De Minaur said he had worked so hard to get himself into the top 10, and he didn’t want to give up the chance to play a Grand Slam with that stature.
“I’ve missed out on some big events of the season already,” he said in an interview ahead of the U.S. Open.
A little over a week later, a shadow of his healthy self, he was able to put up little resistance against Jack Draper in the quarterfinals. His hip had survived for four matches but had given out once more in the fifth.
“I wish I felt better,” he said during his post-match news conference. He hasn’t played since but also hasn’t ruled out making a final push to qualify for the ATP Tour Finals at Europe’s upcoming indoor tournaments.
The economic structure of professional tennis carries much of the blame. Players are independent contractors who, outside of any sponsorship deals and other collateral they may amass, are paid to play. If they fall short of the roughly 20 tournaments per year that the tours deem mandatory, they can be subject to financial penalties.
Careers are short, too. Even the best players, confident as they might seem, always carry the doubt that if they miss too much time the sport will pass them by. And then there are those miracle stories out there to tempt their fantasies. Rafael Nadal took painkilling injections to numb his chronically injured foot during the French Open in 2022. He left Paris on crutches — with his 14th and possibly last Roland Garros title.
In early June, Djokovic had surgery on the meniscus that he tore at the 2024 French Open in early June. Less than four weeks later, he was defending his title at Wimbledon, where he made the final before succumbing to the weight of playing Carlos Alcaraz.
Nadal is the greatest clay court player ever. Djokovic the greatest, period, full-stop. But every athlete is trained to believe that they are special; that even with a low-percentage chance of success, they are capable of miracles.
“That’s why you play,” Dubrov said.
All those thoughts were coursing through Sabalenka’s mind in the days before Wimbledon, a tournament for which she was arguably the favorite — if healthy. Doctors told her she had likely suffered the tear while stretching for a shot, a one-off bad moment instead of a repetitive stress injury. The adjustments to her service motion that turned her career around in 2022 were not to blame. She didn’t need surgery, and could heal with rest and physical therapy.
All good news, but coming off the food poisoning of the French Open, her shoulder aching, it was hard for Sabalenka not to wonder why this crap kept happening.
Dubrov’s focus on taking advantage of the biggest opportunities left in the season was already resonating with Sabalenka, though. Even before this latest injury, she had chosen to skip the Paris Olympics. The atypical shift from clay, to grass, and back to clay was too risky. To win at Roland Garros, the site of the French Open and the Olympic tournament, she had to put extra spin on the ball and swing even harder to move it through the court; any extended run at Wimbledon would curtail her ability to groove those adjustments in training.
She also couldn’t compete for her country, Belarus, because of its support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It wasn’t worth it. She decided to play the longer, safer game and headed home to Miami for some rehabilitation with her physiotherapist Nick DeLisi. By mid-July, she was ready to try to serve again.
Once again, she and her team reminded themselves of the larger goals. The U.S. Open was five weeks away. Getting her ready for the year’s final Grand Slam was all that mattered.
They went to Washington, D.C. for the Citi Open mainly to practice with other pros. Sabalenka was fully prepared to drop out if anything felt weird, even from an advantageous position. She played tentatively, still concerned about reinjuring herself, but won two matches and made the semifinals.
She won two more matches in Toronto — one of the scenes of the serving meltdown that reoriented her career two years ago — before losing to Amanda Anisimova in the semifinals. Then in Cincinnati, during her second match of the tournament against Elina Svitolina, Dubrov noticed that Sabalenka was back to playing with the base level of firepower that had been missing for months.
“There was a connection, physically, mentally, with everything we’re doing on the practice court,” Dubrov said. Sabalenka, he said, was at a level “she can use at least to fight with everyone.”
If that sounds a little below the expectations of the No. 2 player in the world, and the most consistent at Grand Slams in recent times, then that’s because it is the minimum.
All Sabalenka had done was give herself the best chance of achieving some of the things she most wanted to achieve. Like winning the U.S. Open, which had slipped through her fingers in 2023. Or finishing the year as the world No. 1, which Swiatek last year snatched from her by finishing 2023 with an 11-match winning streak.
Tennis players are not robots. Cracking one backhand onto a postage stamp provides no guarantee that the next backhand won’t go into the bottom of the net. A peaking underdog in the rankings, reckoning of titles, or most often and most simply tennis skill can ride the ultimate purple patch, as Botic van de Zandschulp did for three full sets against Alcaraz in the second round of this year’s U.S. Open.
Karolina Muchova of the Czech Republic upset Sabalenka in the quarterfinals of the Beijing Open, her first tournament back that she seriously thought about winning. That was a disappointment but not too much of a bother. Muchova is a top-10 player when she’s healthy and is still in the early stages of a comeback from wrist surgery. She was maybe the most in-form player in women’s tennis when she beat the Belarusian in three tight sets, before floating through a semifinal against Olympic gold medalist Zheng Qinwen — and then losing in straight sets to Coco Gauff.
With Swiatek also taking the long view, by taking a break as she chooses her next coach, the two best women’s players in the world are at different stages in maximizing their dueling opportunities. Swiatek is transitioning to a yet-to-be-named coach after firing Tomasz Wiktorowski, who guided her the past three seasons and with whom she won four Grand Slam titles and has spent 124 weeks and counting as the best player in the world. Her defeats have started to look too alike, her spirals into errors and then losses too easy to foresee and too difficult to forestall.
She could yet reassert her prominence over Sabalenka at the season-ending Tour Finals in Riyadh, but Sabalenka has taken the opportunity to move ahead in the race to be the best in the world come the end of the season.
“I hope she’ll figure out the coach situation and she’ll be back in the finals in her best shape,” Sabalenka said of Swiatek during a press conference in Wuhan. “Hopefully we can play against each other there.”
That was nearly unthinkable when she made the decision to pull out of Wimbledon with her team, but that was the point. They took the action they felt they had to take. Hindsight would be the proof of concept.
The rearview mirror is looking pretty good right now.
“My whole life, I’ve been working so hard to get to the top hundred, then top 50, then top 10, get to the top two,” Sabalenka said last month in a press conference ahead of the China Open.
“To be called the best player in the world, that means everything. It’s good to know that you’ve been doing the right thing, all of that, hours of training, wasn’t a waste of time.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennis, Women’s Tennis
2024 The Athletic Media Company
