Aryna Sabalenka’s U.S. Open win confirms battle for supremacy with Iga Swiatek

NEW YORK — By winning the U.S. Open, Aryna Sabalenka established herself as the preeminent force in women’s tennis of the moment — but world No. 1 Iga Swiatek will have something to say about that.

Sabalenka’s gritty 7-5, 7-5 win over Jessica Pegula felt like a landmark victory for a number of reasons. It is Sabalenka’s first Grand Slam away from the Australian Open, and it makes her the only WTA player to currently hold two majors. Most of all, it demonstrates clear growth from a year ago.

Last September, Sabalenka wilted on Arthur Ashe Stadium in the final against Coco Gauff. She won the first set but imploded thereafter, losing pretty comfortably in three, and a similar thing happened against Swiatek in the semifinals in 2022, when the Pole won the tournament.

It looked like history might be repeating itself against another American on Saturday, when Sabalenka lost five straight games to trail 5-3 in the second set.

Instead she won four consecutive games of her own to haul herself over the line, leaning on the variety she has developed in the past year, and which also helped her to pinch the first set with a drop shot and a clinical volley.

With improvements to her game and to her mental strength, Sabalenka is trending upwards, also achieving complete dominance on hard courts in the biggest events. In her last 28 Grand Slam matches on the surface she has 27 wins.

Swiatek, like Sabalenka, could be considered a surface specialist on clay. She has won four of the last five French Opens, and all of the last three. Before winning this year’s title, she won the lead-in WTA 1000 tournaments in Madrid and Rome, beating Sabalenka in both finals.

She ended the 2024 clay swing with a record of 22 wins and one defeat, to Elena Rybakina in Stuttgart. Swiatek and Sabalenka are unmistakably clear at the top of the women’s game as the season enters its final stretches, and all is set up for a hard-court vs. clay-court fight for supremacy.

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Or maybe not. Swiatek won Doha in February, Indian Wells in March, and swept to the WTA Finals title at the back end of last year. She has an 88 per cent win record overall in 2024, won the 2022 U.S. Open by beating Sabalenka on the way, and has 16 titles at Grand Slam, WTA 1000, and Tour Finals level to Sabalenka’s nine, with the Belarusian three years older.

Sabalenka got to the French Open quarterfinals comfortably, and lost to Mirra Andreeva in three sets when suffering from illness; the Belarusian also had to pull out of Wimbledon with a shoulder injury. This is not a tale of surface tension, but rather a battle between Grand Slam ascendancy and remarkable consistency.

Swiatek went out of the Australian Open and of Wimbledon in the third round, and then lost in the quarters here to Jessica Pegula. She hasn’t gone beyond the last eight at a Slam outside the French Open since winning here in 2022, while Sabalenka has reached the semifinals or better in seven of her last eight majors.

Swiatek remains the deserving world No. 1, with a margin of over 2100 points even after Sabalenka’s win. But there’s now someone else winning on the biggest stages with the kind of regularity that many expect from Swiatek, and given the variance in their schedules this year, the trajectory may continue for Sabalenka more easily than Swiatek can steepen her own, already remarkable rise.

Ahead of the U.S. Open, Sabalenka spoke of how much good rest during Wimbledon and the Olympics had done her, and said that in retrospect she should have taken a break in March, after the death of her ex-boyfriend Konstantin Koltsov, a former Belarusian international ice hockey player.

“I realised it only after I was injured and had to step back that actually it (a break) was something much needed,” she said in a tournament press conference.

Throughout the tournament, Sabalenka has had a lightness that comes from winning match after match. She’s now on a streak of 12 in a row, during which time she’s lost one set. On Saturday night, she was joking around during her press conference, laughing at the temporary tiger tattoo on her coach Jason Stacy’s head and self-deprecatingly saying she might give serve-volleying a go if she develops the nerve.

“A Plan C,” she called it, which is a scary proposition. It was evidence of how Sabalenka feels alive with possibility — winning does that to a player. She’ll go into the Australian Open in January as the big favourite, and thinks that the whole world No. 1 thing will take care of itself.

“I’m not trying to focus on ranking, to be honest,” Sabalenka said on Saturday, sounding like the tennis equivalent of the carefree millionaire who says they’re really not that motivated by money.

“It’s not like I’m checking where I’m gonna be after the tournament. I know that if at each tournament I can play my best tennis, I’ll be able to become world No 1 again.”

Swiatek, on the other hand, has spoken this summer about the increase in the number of mandatory events on the WTA Tour schedule being too demanding for the players.

After she was beaten by Pegula on Wednesday, it was put to her that she might benefit from a break.

“I don’t think it would make sense,” said Swiatek, who also went deep at the Olympics — winning a bronze medal.

“If you’re out of tour, then it’s pretty hard to come back. I don’t want to take a break.”

Sabalenka’s success may suggest that coming back is possible, however the next few months shake out, and it is also a reminder that Grand Slam results aren’t everything in the rankings, with Swiatek sitting so far ahead. In 2023, Sabalenka ironically became the world No. 1 after the U.S. Open defeat to Gauff, before Swiatek wrestled it back at the WTA Finals.

Overall, it’s been a year in which the top of the women’s game has settled a bit. It’s the first season since 2014 that there hasn’t been a first-time champion at the majors — though Barbora Krejcikova’s Wimbledon win was a surprise.

Swiatek remains comfortable at the very summit, with the most titles (five), the most WTA 1,000 titles (four), and the most matches won (59). She also has the highest win percentage, at 88. She is by every conceivable measure the world’s best player. But Sabalenka is the one with the tangible Grand Slam titles and the intangible momentum, heading into 2025 to defend her two-time Australian Open title with apparently no major on-court issues to overcome.

Despite what’s been a statistically phenomenal year for Swiatek, she can’t say the same, with her losses following a pattern in which she cannot divert from Plan A to Plan B — a skill that Sabalenka used to win the semifinal and final here in New York.

Sabalenka is not the best player in the world on paper. But she wouldn’t swap her position right now with anybody else.

(Top photo: Robert Prange / Getty Images)