{"id":93579,"date":"2025-11-12T07:45:21","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T12:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/?p=93579"},"modified":"2025-11-11T17:50:48","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T22:50:48","slug":"rybakina-finishes-season-500-aces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2025\/11\/12\/rybakina-finishes-season-500-aces\/","title":{"rendered":"Elena Rybakina Breaks Decade Old Record"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Elena Rybakina capped off an incredible end to her 2025 season by winning her second-biggest title at the WTA Finals and surpassing 500 aces. She was undefeated in her run to the final and <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2025\/11\/07\/wta-finals-final-prediction-sabalenka-rybakina\/\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_self\">overpowered World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka<\/a> in straight sets in the final match in Riyadh to take home the most prestigious trophy outside the four Grand Slams.<\/p>\n<p>With Saturday&#8217;s victory over Sabalenka, she secured her 10th Top 10 win of the season and bagged $5.23 million in prize money, the highest amount in a WTA-sanctioned event. This was her third title of the season and will start her in the new year on an 11-match winning streak.<\/p>\n<h2>Rybakina hit over 500 aces in 2025<\/h2>\n<p>Rybakina led the WTA ace chart in 2025, hammering 516 aces, including 13 in knocking off Sabalenka in the final. According to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wtatennis.com\/stats\/2025\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">WTA stats<\/a>, she is the first WTA player to breach the 500-mark since Karolina Pliskova almost a decade ago.<\/p>\n<p>The Kazakh finished comfortably on top with second-placed Linda Noskova managing 373 aces and Denmark&#8217;s Clara Tauson in third spot, tallying 358. Ekaterina Alexandrova (339) and Naomi Osaka (307) complete the top five in this list.<\/p>\n<p>Having finished runner-up three times in the ace count over the last three years, Rybakina&#8217;s serve proved to be a destructive shot from the baseline. For WTA players who played three or more matches this year, Rybakina had the highest figure of first-serve points won (74.4%) and averaged 64.1% of total points won on serve (also better than the rest of the tour). She also led the field in service games won (82.5%).<\/p>\n<p>Rybakina hit fewer double faults (222) than five of the world&#8217;s Top 10 players, which underlines the consistency of her first serve.<\/p>\n<p>After a stuttering start to the season without a single final in the first four months, Rybakina found form in the nick of time. She was undefeated in her last three tournaments and achieved a top-five year-end ranking.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Main Photo Syndication: Desert Sun<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Elena Rybakina capped off an incredible end to her 2025 season by winning her second-biggest title at the WTA Finals and surpassing 500 aces. She was undefeated in her run to the final and overpowered World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka in straight sets in the final match in Riyadh to take home the most prestigious [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2341,"featured_media":80947,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[5595,297,364],"class_list":["post-93579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-wta","tag-elena-rybakina","tag-wta-finals","tag-wta-tour"],"modified_by":"Shane Black","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2341"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93579"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93677,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93579\/revisions\/93677"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}