Aryna Sabalenka plays under no flag and for a man who has never seen her win. The story of how Aryna Sabalenka became a tennis player is, at its heart, a car journey. One afternoon, her father Sergey was driving her somewhere in Minsk when he spotted a tennis court on the way. He pulled over, took her in, and she liked it. That, she would later say, was how it started.
Sergey Sabalenka was a former ice hockey player, broad-shouldered and cheerful. By the time Aryna was around seven or nine years old, she had already decided she wanted to be like him. “He was so funny. So happy,” she told Flaunt Magazine. “I looked to him thinking, ‘I hope when I grow up I’ll have this personality.’ He was always focusing on the positive things rather than the negative.”
He raised her to fight, and he raised her to believe. Between them, quietly, they built a pact. “We had one dream,” Sabalenka said in the tennis documentary series Break Point. “That before 25, I will win a couple of grand slams.” It was a private thing, one that exists only between two people and is held more carefully because of that.
In November 2019, Sergey Sabalenka died of meningitis. He was forty-three years old. Aryna was twenty-one.
The Story Behind The Player: Aryna Sabalenka
The Training Ground
In the weeks that followed, she went back to the court. It was the only place the grief quieted. “During practice, I could finally stop thinking about everything,” she said. “The moment it ended, the memories would come back and I’d cry again. But practice gave me space to breathe.”
She cried alone. Her mother was grieving worse, and Sabalenka did not want to add to it. “I had to be strong and not show my emotions,” she said. “But I cried a lot when no one saw me.”
There was a period, in the worst of the grief, when she couldn’t serve. The whole mechanism fell apart under the weight of what she was carrying. With the help of coaches and a psychologist, she eventually rebuilt it. She became the most powerful server in women’s tennis. She became number one in the world. She did all of this without a flag.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Belarusian athletes have been required to compete at Grand Slams as neutrals. At the 2023 Australian Open, Sabalenka became the first player competing under a neutral flag to win a Grand Slam title. She has navigated the politics of the situation as best as she could. She has said, simply, that she does not support war, that she wants peace, and that she is there for tennis. Ukrainian players have sometimes refused to shake hands. Crowds have sometimes been hostile. She has stepped past all of it and walked to the baseline.
The Price of Proximity
In March 2024, while in Florida for the Miami Open, Aryna Sabalenka received news that her former partner Konstantin Koltsov had died. Koltsov was a former Belarusian ice hockey player who had represented his country at two Winter Olympics and spent three seasons in the NHL with the Pittsburgh Penguins. His death was ruled an apparent suicide by the Miami-Dade Police Department. Sabalenka clarified in a statement that she and Koltsov were no longer together at the time of his death. “Konstantin’s death is an unthinkable tragedy,” she wrote, “and while we were no longer together, my heart is broken.”
She continued practicing. She played in the tournament. There was no other framework for what to do. The court had always been where she went when she did not know where else to go. Caroline Wozniacki, in tears at a press conference, said she could not imagine what Sabalenka was going through and that everyone on tour was there for her. The tennis world watched as Sabalenka absorbed another blow in a public place and gave very little away.
Melbourne, January 2023
When the final point fell in her favour at the 2023 Australian Open, Aryna Sabalenka fell to the ground. Her coach, Anton Dubrov, sobbed into a towel in the players’ box. In her on-court speech, she thanked her team and said almost nothing about her family. Then, in a quieter moment before the ceremony was over, she looked up at the sky.
It was for him. It had always been for him. “When he passed away, I was very depressed, and it was a tough moment for me, for my family,” she said after winning the US Open two years later. “But in that moment, I decided to take it as motivation to put our family name in the history. And I know that he’s — I want to believe — and I think I feel his protection from up there.”
From time to time, she goes to church and lights a candle for her grandfather and her father. She does not post about it. She does not talk about it in interviews unless asked, and even then, she keeps it brief. It belongs to her. She has now won four Grand Slams. She has been number one in the world. She has done everything she promised. Every time she wins a match and looks up at an empty sky, there is the same small gesture: a kiss sent somewhere, to someone who drove past a tennis court one afternoon and decided it was worth stopping.
Main Photo Credit: Mike Frey – Imagn Images
