Aryna Sabalenka overtakes Iga Swiatek in WTA race as they prioritise tennis futures

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.