Sabalenka’s China Open Loss to Bartunkova Shows Her Comeback Engine Has Stalled

Aryna Sabalenka has made a career out of answering pressure with more pressure. The serve gets heavier, the forehand gets louder, and the player across the net eventually flinches. In Beijing nobody flinched, and the explanation she gave afterward was narrower, and more honest, than the word “upset” that ran across the wires: she could not get the ball back.

Nikola Bartunkova, a young Czech facing her for the first time, served her way out of every break point Sabalenka created and took their third-round meeting at the China Open in straight sets. Most coverage filed it next to Elena Rybakina’s early exit as a double shock for the tournament’s top seeds. That framing is tidy. It also misses why this loss should worry Sabalenka more than any single scoreline.

“She is very talented, and moves well on court. She also serves well so you have to convert your chances against her,” Sabalenka said, according to Tennis365. “She can serve really well and to return from shade or sun is tricky. I wasn’t good at this today.”

That is a player diagnosing one shot, not a crisis, and the match backs her up. She earned five break points in a single game of the first set and converted none of them. In the second set she did not earn another. Bartunkova saved all five, hit four aces, and broke Sabalenka three times from eight chances. Al Jazeera reported that she tossed her racquet in the second set, the body saying what the box score would confirm later.

The sharper number sits further down the WTA’s own match notes. Sabalenka has now lost six consecutive matches after dropping the first set, and she is 3-7 this season from that position. For a competitor whose whole game is built on forcing the issue, that is the stat to circle. When the opening set slips away, the turnaround is no longer arriving.

The season around it explains the edge in her voice. Sabalenka won Brisbane, Indian Wells and Miami before the end of March. Since then she has gone nine tournaments without a title. She reached two Grand Slam finals and lost both to Rybakina, at the Australian Open and again at the US Open, and after New York the world No. 1 ranking passed to Rybakina. A quarterfinal loss to Diana Shnaider at Roland Garros and a fourth-round defeat to Naomi Osaka at Wimbledon fill in the rest of a Slamless year.

None of that takes anything from Bartunkova. The 20-year-old from Prague was the No. 26 seed, not the qualifier some headlines called her, and she climbed to a career-high No. 34 after breaking into the top 100 in March. This was the second top-10 win of her career, after Belinda Bencic at the Australian Open, and it took one hour and 35 minutes. “It is the biggest win of my career,” she told the WTA. Her own summary was simpler: “I focused on myself, to be calm.” Next up is Austria’s Sinja Kraus in the round of 16.

Beijing has never been kind to Sabalenka. In five main-draw appearances she has not reached a semifinal, stopping in the quarterfinals in 2018, 2023 and 2024. So the venue partly explains the result. The return game, and the vanished comeback, are hers to fix.

The calendar gives her the right place to try. The WTA 1000 in Wuhan starts on October 12, and it is her tournament in a way Beijing never was: three titles, in 2018, 2019 and 2024, and a 20-1 record, the lone loss coming against Jessica Pegula in last year’s semifinals. Rybakina arrives there as the new No. 1 and Coco Gauff as the defending champion.

Sabalenka will walk into the one draw where she has almost never needed to come back from anything. If she drops a first set there and still cannot turn it around, Beijing will stop looking like a bad afternoon and start looking like the new shape of her game.

Tags: Aryna Sabalenka, Elena Rybakina, China Open, Nikola Bartunkova, Wuhan Open