U.S. Open 2024: Aryna Sabalenka's hard work finally pays off with a long-awaited championship
Aryna Sabalenka kisses the championship trophy after defeating Jessica Pegula in the U.S. Open women’s finals at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows on Saturday. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
Aryna Sabalenka was used to being the villain at Arthur Ashe.
She was used to hearing the groans when she broke the serve of an American opponent. She was used to hearing applause when she hit a shot into the net.
Sabalenka knew that a very small percentage of the sellout crowd at the women’s final Saturday wanted to see her beat American Jessica Pegula. She knew it painfully well, but this time she just didn’t care.
Sabalenka finally captured the U.S. Open championship she had long coveted with a 7-5, 7-5 win over Pegula in a tight match filled with momentum swings.
The No. 2-seeded Belarusian was able to exorcise the ghost of her three-set loss to Coco Gauff in last year’s final on the same court. She did it by unleashing her power and harnessing her emotions, especially after Pegula drove the crowd into a near frenzy by winning five straight games in the second set.
In so many ways, that moment should have been a flashback to that painful match last year, when after easily winning the first set against Gauff, Sabalenka committed unforced error after unforced error as the 19-year-old Gauff charged back to win the title.
Minutes after the award ceremony was over last year, Sabalenka walked to a workout area in a hallway just off the tennis court. She calmly set her runner-up trophy on her bag and took out her racket. She smashed it over and over on the ground, breaking its frame, before dumping it into a trash can.
This year, there was no tennis racket carnage at the end of the match. Instead, Sabalenka hoisted the championship trophy she had long coveted over her head, waving and smiling at the crowd.
“Finally, I got this beautiful trophy. It means a lot,” she said in her on-court interview. “It’s been a difficult two weeks. I remember all the tough losses in the past here.”
Sabalenka remembered, but this time she didn’t obsess about them. Too much has happened to her this year to let that hold her back now that she had gotten so close.
In March, her ex-boyfriend, Belarusian pro hockey player Konstantin Koltsov, died in Miami Beach, and police ruled his death an apparent suicide. Sabalenka, who was in South Florida for the Miami Open at the time, commented, “I am heartbroken.”
Times weren’t easier on the tennis court. A stomach bug hampered her at the French Open and a shoulder injury forced her to withdraw from Wimbledon.
She said she was driven to end the year on a good note and achieve something she had always dreamed of achieving. “If you keep working hard and sacrificing everything for a dream, you’re going to get there one day,” she said. “I’m super-proud of myself. I never say that.”
The win was Sabalenka’s third career major singles title as she won the Australian Open for the second consecutive year in January. She’s the first woman to sweep the hard-court majors since Angelique Kerber in 2016.
This marked the fourth straight year in which she made it at least as far as the semifinals.
The sixth-seeded Pegula entered the match on an impressive run, having won 15 of her 16 matches since the Olympics. Her sole loss was 6-3, 7-5 to Sabalenka three weeks ago in Cincinnati.
Pegula, 30, has showed incredible resilience, coming back from a series of injuries early in her career and a bad start to this season. She bowed out in the second round of the Australian Open, losing in straight sets to a player who wasn’t ranked in the top 50.
So maybe it should have been no surprise that after losing a tight first set and falling behind 0-3 in the second set on Saturday, she made an impressive run at Sabalenka. Pegula won five straight games and was serving for the match at 5-4.
“In that second set, I was literally sitting there and praying,” Sabalenka said. “Honestly, after me leading 3-love, I didn’t really expect her to come back with such a high level. I’m really glad that I was able to hold my serve in that 5-3 down. Then to break her back, it gave me so much belief that I can close this match in two sets.”
Close the match and the feeling that she can’t win it all here.
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.