Twice down break point while two games from victory against world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka, Elena Rybakina stepped up to serve. She had let victory slip through her fingers against Sabalenka two months earlier in Berlin, squandering four consecutive match points in a third-set tiebreak. She had suffered close losses from winning positions all year.
In Mason, Ohio Friday, Rybakina rose to the pressure and sent down two aces. Sabalenka could only look at the court in disbelief, as her Cincinnati Open title defense disappeared before her eyes in a 6-1, 6-4 defeat.
The opening set had started the same way as some of Rybakina’s toughest defeats in 2025: With the world No. 10 playing incredible tennis. After saving a break point in her opening service game, she knocked the world No. 1 off her feet, breezing through the first set and breaking Sabalenka twice. Rybakina was relentless, while Sabalenka came out of another untidy opening set in 2025 on the wrong side of the scoreboard, which hasn’t happened often.
She normally finds a way whatever the set, having won 18 tiebreaks of 19 in 2025. But of those 19 sets that ended in tiebreaks, only two featured zero breaks of serve. Sabalenka, more often than not able to break back when she is down, couldn’t do it against Rybakina.
Rybakina again saved break points at the start of the second set, after Sabalenka won six points in a row and looked set to make a surge of her own before Rybakina arrested her momentum. Later came those decisive aces, which deflated the world No. 1’s hopes of a comeback against a player who has found closing difficult for most of the year.
Rybakina won a similarly dominant set just over a week ago at the Canadian Open against Victoria Mboko; she lost their match, a semifinal, in three sets. She won the first set by the same scoreline against then-defending champion Iga Świątek at the French Open; she lost their match, a fourth-round encounter, in three sets.
Between Canada and Cincinnati, her previously barred coach, Stefano Vukov, has returned to her box. Vukov’s one-year WTA Tour ban, for breaching its code of conduct, was lifted after he appealed.
Sabalenka will move on to preparations for the U.S. Open, where she is defending champion. Rybakina will face Świątek in the semifinals, after the No. 3 seed dispatched Russia’s Anna Kalinskaya in straight sets, 6-3, 6-4.