Aryna Sabalenka's U.S. Open Journey: From Crisis to Confidence
NEW YORK — Scroll Aryna Sabalenka’s Instagram and you see a woman in complete command of her life. High fashion in glossy cities. Sun-drenched beaches. A bikini by the pool. A season that looks like a dream.
Step onto the court, though, and the picture changes fast.
The world No. 1 has not gone beyond the fourth round at her last few events. Her results have dipped, her aura has dimmed, and the player who once looked set to storm through this hard-court swing now arrives at the U.S. Open looking nothing like a lock to win a third straight title in New York.
She isn’t buying the crisis narrative.
“Maybe there’s something wrong with people,” she snapped when asked what’s gone wrong with her game.
That edge has become her shield. Her black, mesh-covered outfit in New York has drawn its own wave of opinions. She brushed those aside, too.
“Who cares about people, right? All matters for me is that I love it,” Sabalenka said.
A few months ago, this season seemed to be building toward dominance. Sabalenka lost a tight Australian Open final to Elena Rybakina, then ripped through the North American spring, taking back-to-back hard-court titles at Indian Wells and Miami. Her power looked unanswerable again. Even when Naomi Osaka stopped her in the fourth round at Wimbledon, the assumption was simple: she’d reset, come back to the hard courts, and resume flattening opponents.
That script never arrived.
In Toronto, Ekaterina Alexandrova knocked her out in the fourth round. In Cincinnati, Sabalenka led in both sets against Sara Bejlek and still lost, visibly battling herself as much as the opponent, the kind of emotional spiral that once defined her early years on tour.
She won’t spell out exactly what has been going on behind the scenes, but she made it clear the last stretch has been heavy.
“It wasn’t the best period. I don’t want to defend myself, but obviously I just don’t want to talk about that period. I’ve been dealing with several things,” she said.
Then came the pivot, the one she leans on whenever doubt creeps into the conversation.
“But who cares, right? Yeah, I didn’t perform my best. These tough lessons are definitely going to make me way, way stronger and working even harder. I work on my mental side of the game. I was trying to reset my mind and to come back stronger, so it’s only going to make me stronger. It’s only a matter of time for me to come back.”
Few places offer a better stage for a reset than New York. Sabalenka claimed her first U.S. Open title here in 2024, beating Jessica Pegula in the final, then backed it up last year by defeating Amanda Anisimova for a successful defense. The city suits her. The noise, the lights, the demand to perform on command — it all feeds into the combative streak that powers her tennis.
Reaching No. 1 has brought a different kind of spotlight. Endorsements. Fashion shoots. Mid-season trips to Greece with her fiancé. A lifestyle that plays perfectly on social media and just as perfectly into the hands of critics who want to question how badly she still wants it.
Is she working enough? Is she playing too little and posting too much?
Paula Badosa, close friend and occasional co-star in those photos, has little patience for that storyline.
“She’s still No. 1 in the world. So I think the results are there,” Badosa said.
“Of course, everyone is going to expect for her to win every tournament. That’s very, very difficult. And at the moment, that one player is not winning what they expected. Of course, they’re saying that it’s because of the photo shoots or the TikToks and all this stuff, and I’m not going to lie, she’s been doing that since she was maybe out of the top 100. And when she was winning, nobody says anything, you know? And when she loses a couple of matches, it’s because of that. I think it’s none of it.”
The rankings table, though, doesn’t care about context. Sabalenka’s summer slide has cracked the door open. Rybakina, Pegula and others are closing in. A shallow run in New York could cost her the top spot she fought so hard to claim.
She has handled this kind of pressure here before. She knows what it takes to live for two weeks inside the chaos of Flushing Meadows and walk away with the trophy. She also knows that right now, questions about her form will not stop.
Sabalenka, as ever, prefers the fight.
“Well, that’s the beauty of the sport,” she said. “Throw tough challenges at me, I will come back only stronger.”
The rankings will soon show whether that defiance is just talk — or the start of another surge.
