Sabalenka, 24, was playing in her first Grand Slam singles final after breaking through following three semifinal appearances in the past two years.
It all began on Saturday night in Melbourne as the first Australian Open final of two players under 25 years old since January 2012. It began after a weird dearth of split-set matches at the 2023 Australian Open, with straight sets enough to decide six of eight fourth-round matches, all four quarterfinals and both semifinals. And it began with Rybakina, the 23-year-old Russian who has played for Kazakhstan since 2018, bidding to elbow toward the top of the sport right up near No.
Her service side stayed almost airtight with 17 aces and only one more break point faced until the harrowing final game. Her returns rose by a notch in caliber so she could break Rybakina after one deuce in the fourth game of the second set and after three deuces in the seventh game of the third. The match filled with the deuces of long, tight games — a 57-minute second set, a 57-minute third — its soundtrack the shrieks and grunts of Sabalenka against Rybakina’s noiseless power.
Finally, Sabalenka faced a monster of a closing game, serving with her mighty serve, one of the two mighty serves present in the final. She double-faulted with two long serves on her first championship point at 40-30, her seventh of the match , and with that she revisited an old horror that used to plague her game until she spent much of last year in the hard act of repair. She answered that with a sharp cross-court forehand winner, showing her steel.
She pulled a forehand wide on the second championship opportunity, then faced a break point she erased with a service winner to the corner. On a third championship point, two hours and 26 minutes into the match, she shoved a backhand just long, but while she made the occasional gesture acknowledging her struggle — a slight smile, even — she won the battle with herself. In her career, she said, “I started to respect myself more,” to “having this understanding that I’m a good player.
So she put away a sitter earned from her serve to gain a fourth championship point, and she hung right in a tricky closing six-shot exchange with balls hitting lines, until one last ball did not, and she had prevailed over herself and one hell of an opponent.
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