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This article is part of our New York Court Classics series, a special feature produced by The Athletic looking back at classic U.S. Open performances, iconic athletes and timeless moments.
Down match point in a second-set tiebreak and on the verge of an unceremonious exit from the last Grand Slam of 2022, Aryna Sabalenka got lucky. Her opponent, Kaia Kanepi, was in control of the rally, waiting for an easy volley to put their second-round U.S. Open match away.
Instead, a net cord took the ball away from her and kept Sabalenka in the tournament.
Sabalenka saved another match point shortly after, won the tiebreak a couple of points later, and then won the match. Having been 6-2, 5-1 down after 51 minutes, she turned the deficit into a 2-6, 7-6(9), 6-4 victory.
“It was a crazy match, a really crazy match,” Sabalenka said in a news conference ahead of this year’s tournament. “Crazy conditions. The sun was going down, and the shade was really crazy. It was tricky. Both of us, I felt like we could barely see the ball.”
Summing up the duality of the match, a laughing Sabalenka said: “It was a fun and really not fun match.”
The immediate story was a comeback from the brink of tennis despair. It was also the bigger story, as Sabalenka converted a torrid tennis year into the start of her climb to the top of the sport. The extraordinary match, full of undulations and incredible tension, encapsulated everything she hoped to be as a player. It also encapsulated everything inside her that was getting in the way.
That year’s U.S. Open was Sabalenka’s first major since hitting tennis rock bottom. In early August, she suffered a three-set loss to Coco Gauff at the Canadian Open, in which she hit 18 double faults. The previous week, she had served 20 in a quarterfinal loss to Daria Kasatkina in San Jose, California. She had served 23 in the match before that. By the time she met Kanepi in New York, she would have hit 345 double faults for the year from 42 matches, averaging more than eight per match. In 2021, she had hit 338 in the entire season.
After the defeat to Gauff, Sabalenka, then 24, sat on the ground next to her two main coaches, Jason Stacy and Anton Dubrov, and wept. She felt she had done everything to fix her serve. Her morale had sunk so low that she came close to retiring, she said in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar Australia earlier this year.
“A time that comes to mind where I had to show my resilience and where I was really close to saying, ‘OK, I’m done,’ was two or three years ago when I was double-faulting non-stop and everything seemed to be going wrong,” she said.
Stacy, however, felt Sabalenka had not done everything. She had not taken the nuclear option: remodeling it from the ground up. So he put her in touch with Gavin MacMillan, a Canadian former college tennis player who lives in South Africa and specializes in biomechanics. A couple of days after the tough conversation in Toronto, MacMillan joined Sabalenka on court in Mason, Ohio, ahead of the Cincinnati Open. Sabalenka ended up reaching the semifinals there.
Then she beat Catherine Harrison in the first round of the U.S. Open to set up the match against Kanepi, a veteran Estonian who had triumphed in their last Grand Slam encounter at the Australian Open seven months earlier. Sabalenka had missed Wimbledon, with Belarusian players banned after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Her views on the war were under as much scrutiny as her tennis.
Kanepi entered the tournament with a different kind of reputation: the seed slayer. Ranked No. 34, she just missed the cut for a seeding of her own — much to the disappointment of the leading players. Hugely powerful, with a game even more all-or-nothing than Sabalenka, Kanepi, 37 and standing at 5 feet 11 inches like her opponent, could outhit anyone on her day. She had reached the quarterfinals of all four majors with a career-high ranking of world No. 15, but more tellingly, she had 10 wins against top-10 players at the majors, seven of those in the opening two rounds. That included a 6-4, 6-2 thrashing of then world No. 1 Simona Halep in the U.S. Open first round four years earlier.
The match was played on Court 5, part of the central bank just outside Arthur Ashe Stadium that lets fans look across three courts in succession. It was another sign of Sabalenka’s standing at the time, and Kanepi spied the opportunity of another upset.
Kanepi broke Sabalenka’s vulnerable serve in the first game of the match, and secured a double break with a backhand return winner on her way to the opening set. She then raced to a 5-1 lead in the second, and nine minutes shy of the hour mark, Sabalenka was on the verge of another chastening defeat and the end of her Grand Slam season.
Instead, Kanepi’s game quickly went from all to nothing and Sabalenka got a foothold. She won five straight games to get to a tiebreak, but Kanepi steadied herself and went up 5-2, before the first fateful match point and the net cord that changed everything. She missed another match point, sending a return long, and Sabalenka stayed alive when Kanepi netted a forehand that sent Court 5 roaring into a third set, on a sweltering afternoon in New York City.
Sabalenka broke at 2-2 in the third set, but her Achilles’ heel returned at the worst possible time. Serving for the match at 5-4, she hit three double faults of 11 overall, and Kanepi forced two break points. But Sabalenka fended her off, and just as the sun started to set around 7 p.m., she sank to her knees, partly in disbelief and partly out of exhaustion, as Kanepi sent a shot long to end the contest.
“It was really a fight with everything: against the player, against the conditions, against everything,” Sabalenka said. “Plus, I was working on the serve, so it was already a lot of things.”
Sabalenka and Kanepi’s epic took place in the shadow of Arthur Ashe Stadium. (Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
Kanepi never again got to the kind of levels that had made her such a feared giant-killer, winning only one subsequent Grand Slam match. She is listed as inactive by the WTA and, now 40, last played in May 2024. She did not respond to a request for an interview for this article.
For Sabalenka, her comeback in that match may have been complete, but the turnaround from Toronto and her torrid 2022 was still in session. She beat Danielle Collins in the fourth round, having again lost the first set. After being so close to elimination against Kanepi, there was a sense that Sabalenka was now playing with house money, in the tournament and in the wider context of her tennis.
“When you come back from that kind of score, you know that nothing can hurt you,” she said after beating Collins. “You go into the next match and know that you will fight for it no matter what.”
She added Friday: “It (the Kanepi win) gave me a lot of confidence. It was an amazing start to our work with Gavin (MacMillan).”
And while she fell to eventual champion Iga Świątek in three sets in the semifinals, Sabalenka had started her rise to the biggest titles in tennis even as the narrative lingered that she was always so close and yet so far. She won her first Grand Slam title at the Australian Open a few months later; prior to the 2022 U.S. Open, she had reached two Grand Slam semifinals. Since and including that tournament, she has reached the semifinals of 10 of the 11 majors she has entered. She is the reigning champion and world No. 1, with one of the most threatening serves in the game.
What remains is her magnetism for drama, with several of her matches this year going up and down as she seeks a so-far elusive Grand Slam title in 2025. Sabalenka wears her point-to-point emotions on her sleeve like few in professional tennis, always expressing exactly how — and how extremely — she is feeling at any given moment.
So while the 2022 U.S. Open is a reminder of how far she’s come, and few of her matches since have been as dramatic as the Kanepi win, we shouldn’t rule out another New York thriller or two from the world No. 1 in the coming weeks.
(Photos: Mike Stobe, Patrick Smith / Getty Images; Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic)
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