Aryna Sabalenka, four Grand Slams forged from the serve she once couldn’t land in a game

Aryna Sabalenka

Photo: Ocoudis derivative work: Kacir / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 5, 1998 Minsk
Occupation	Tennis Player
Awards	Australian Open champion · US Open champion · WTA World No. 1 ranking

There is a version of Aryna Sabalenka that people have agreed to believe: the Belarusian with the bulldozer forehand, the serve that lands above 120 miles per hour, the player so physically dominant that opponents sometimes seem to be simply waiting for the inevitable to arrive. That version is not wrong. It is merely incomplete, in the way that any account of a person beginning with their strengths tends to omit the thing that made those strengths meaningful.

She grew up in Minsk, where her father Sergey — a former professional ice hockey player — drove past an empty tennis court one afternoon and decided, on something like a whim, to enroll his daughter in classes. She was six years old. By nine she had already concluded that the sport was not for her; she kept going, she has said, to avoid disappointing him. That ambivalence resolved itself quietly over the following decade into recognizable talent, and then into something harder to contain. She began competing on the ITF circuit in her early teens and turned professional at seventeen. Three years later she claimed her first WTA tour victories, in Wuhan and Shenzhen, and by 2021 she had climbed to second in the world rankings — a position that told most of the story of what she was capable of while glancing politely past everything she hadn’t yet managed.

Then her father died. Sergey Sabalenka collapsed in 2019 from meningitis, and died in Minsk at 43 after, by accounts that emerged afterward, repeated requests for emergency medical assistance went unanswered for days. Aryna was twenty-one. The months that followed produced one of the stranger athletic reversals of recent memory: the player with women’s tennis’s most physically imposing serve began double-faulting at a rate that made matches painful to watch, for her and almost certainly for her opponents. It was not a brief interruption. It lasted until 2021. She has spoken about the period with characteristic directness, describing an inability to get through service games, and a recognition — eventually — that the collapse was technical as much as anything else, and that technical problems require technical solutions.

The reconstruction took two years and proceeded alongside the continued demands of competing on the tour. Working with Anton Dubrov — a Belarusian who had been her longtime hitting partner before assuming the full coaching role in 2020 — she rebuilt the motion of her serve from the foundations. In January 2023, the rebuilt version of the weapon won her the Australian Open, her first Grand Slam singles title. She reached the US Open final that year, lost there, and still ended 2023 ranked first in the world — a position she had been projected to reach for years, which arrived by a route that included what amounted to destroying and reassembling her most fundamental shot while continuing to compete at the highest professional level.

What followed was a period of sustained achievement that shifted the conversation from whether she would win Grand Slams to how many. She won the Australian Open again in January 2024, then the US Open in September. Seven titles in the season, world number one without meaningful challenge, the notion of a calendar Grand Slam — no woman has achieved it since Steffi Graf in 1988 — discussed in earnest rather than as a hypothetical. In 2025, she defended the US Open title, making it two consecutive at Flushing Meadows. She has dedicated all four of her Grand Slams to her father’s memory.

The portrait of Sabalenka as a force of nature — the physical scale, the bludgeoning ball-striking, the athlete who simply overwhelms — has always simplified the subject more than it describes it. The serving collapse of 2019 to 2021 rarely features prominently in that account, perhaps because it introduces friction where the dominant-force narrative prefers clarity. What the collapse actually demonstrates is that she is not an athlete who arrived equipped with a weapon and was instructed to fire it. She is an athlete who built the weapon twice: once as a teenager finding her game, and again as a ranked professional forced to dismantle and reassemble her most basic technical asset while the world watched. That sequence matters when reading what the Grand Slam total means. Four titles is not simply the record of superior power. It is the record of someone who chose to rebuild, under pressure, with no guarantee that the rebuild would work.

The question of resilience has accompanied her career beyond the athletic record. In March 2024, Konstantin Koltsov — a former NHL player with whom she had been in a relationship — died by apparent suicide in Miami, at the time in the city to support her appearance at the Miami Open. They were reported to be separated by then. She played the tournament in the immediate aftermath, and said later that tennis had protected her from depression in the weeks that followed: she went to training, she explained, simply to have less time alone with her thoughts. The quality being described — competitive focus maintained through personal loss — had already expressed itself once in 2019. It appears to be constitutional rather than circumstantial.

The 2026 season has been, by her own career standards, a series of answers deferred. She lost the Australian Open final to Elena Rybakina in January, watching a lead in the final set dissolve into a 6–4, 4–6, 6–4 defeat. She exited the French Open in the quarterfinals and Wimbledon in the fourth round, beaten by Naomi Osaka. In March, she announced her engagement to Georgios Frangulis, a Greek-Brazilian entrepreneur and co-founder of Oakberry, the açaí brand that has expanded rapidly across Europe and Latin America. Three titles — at the Brisbane International to open the year, at Indian Wells, where she won her first title at the tournament with a victory over Rybakina in the final, and at the Miami Open, where she defeated Coco Gauff to complete the Sunshine Double — sustained the narrative of dominance without quite resolving the Grand Slam question.

In September, she is at the US Open chasing something that has not been done in women’s singles since Serena Williams won in 2012, 2013, and 2014: three consecutive titles at Flushing Meadows. She advanced through the quarterfinals, beating Linda Nosková in three sets — her sixth consecutive US Open semifinal, matching Williams’s record from that era. The three-peat is two wins away. The wider question is simpler and has already been answered: whether the rebuild produced the most complete version of the weapon it set out to create, and whether that weapon, once rebuilt twice, holds.

Tags: sports, athletes, tennis, US Open, Grand Slam, Aryna Sabalenka, Australian Open, WTA

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