Aryna Sabalenka SELF Cover Interview: The Tennis Star Is Ready for Her Next Set

The score is 3-3, and Aryna Sabalenka is up against her former doubles partner, Elise Mertens. The two women have been exchanging volleys, grunts, and game points in a tight first set. Even though it’s the quarterfinals, it’s Sabalenka’s first game at the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix, a warm-up tournament for May’s French Open in Stuttgart, Germany. Sabalenka hit the ball long, just beyond the baseline. The umpire calls it out, giving Mertens the advantage at 4-3.

Sabalenka didn’t like the call and mounted a challenge, but the chair umpire confirmed that the shot was out. During the changeover, Sabalenka stalked over to the baseline and examined the mark left by the ball in the clay—her proof that the ball was right on the line. When the chair umpire wouldn’t take another look, Sabalenka retrieved a phone from someone in her section and took a picture of the smudge in the dirt. Yet the umpire’s call remained, and when play restarted, she looked a little rattled.

While some might say that her on-court photography went a bit too far—she did receive a code violation warning for unsportsmanlike conduct—Sabalenka was able to re-center herself so the incident didn’t spiral into something bigger: She won in straight sets. Sabalenka clinched her semifinal match too, but ended up losing in the final.

I first talk to Sabalenka about two weeks before this match. When I ask her whether the pressure on the court changed after she won her first Grand Slam, she tells me that she had made the decision to ground herself, to focus inward, and avoid getting wrapped up in the frustrations and emotions that high-stakes tennis can trigger. But it’s clear that it’s still a work in progress.

Earlier this month, in her quarterfinal match against Qinwen Zheng at the Italian Open, she received another code violation, this time for shouting an obscenity at a fan who yelled at her from the stands.

“We all are human beings and not robots, so at that moment, I wasn’t feeling like my best and was overreacting,” Sabalenka, 27, says via email when I reach out again after our initial conversation to ask about the incident in Rome. She acknowledges that her response to the perceived heckling is something she’s “not proud of.”

Tennis isn’t just about playing the opponent on the other side of the net: It’s “me against me,” as Sabalenka has said in post-match press conferences. These two instances show that she certainly is a fighter, driven to bring her top competitive vibe to each and every match—her nickname is The Tiger, after all, an image she got tattooed on her forearm after months of dreaming about it. It reminds her to keep going, to keep pushing forward. “I have to fight, and I have to be like a tiger on court,” she tells me when we speak over Zoom before Stuttgart. But sometimes being a fighter also means learning to pick your battles, developing the understanding of when to say “I’m not going to waste my energy there,” as she describes it. While it’s something top of mind for her, Stuttgart and Rome show that like so many things in Sabalenka’s life, the path to that ultimate result is winding; it’s not exactly a straight shot.

Being a professional tennis player means that there’s always another external (and internal) match-up, another chance to get it right—or wrong—and to figure out how to do things better. And tennis fans get an up-close look at it as it all unfolds. For those who have seen Sabalenka play, even if it’s just a clip on social media, it’s widely acknowledged that she’s one of the hardest hitters on tour. She’s a player with a dominant forehand and blistering serve who doesn’t back down from a challenge. Aggressive. All business. She wants to win every point in every match, and her tenacity has helped her clinch three Grand Slams. She’s ranked number one in the world, a mark she briefly flirted with in 2023 but has held steadily since October 2024. And while she might grumble about missing out on the top spot at the Australian Open, Indian Wells, and in Stuttgart and Rome, she is arguably the in-form player to watch this season—and is ready to vie for the title at this month’s French Open, where she is the top seed in the tournament.

But there’s more to Sabalenka, which you may miss if you’ve only clocked her on-court persona. She’s goofy and silly too. She teases her team during post-match interviews. She dances and makes fun of herself on TikTok, where she’s amassed nearly 800,000 followers. She signs her fitness coach Jason Stacy’s head before big matches.

“It’s so much stress and pressure already,” she says. “To be happy on court, you have to have something off court, something that will help you to stay positive and have fun.”

It’s not about dwelling on the past, the unforced errors, the balls that sailed long, the finals where she came up short, or the code violations. Instead, she’s focused on the moments in front of her, things she still wants to achieve, and how far she can go in the sport. She doesn’t have it all figured out yet, of course, but along the way, she’s finding her inner strength and confidence and learning how to disconnect from tennis life. Most importantly, she’s having fun.

It’s all part of the evolution of Aryna Sabalenka.

Born in Minsk, Belarus, Sabalenka first picked up a tennis racket when she was six. Her father, Sergey, a former ice hockey player, was looking for something—anything—to keep his active daughter busy. “I wasn’t a sitting-in-one-spot kid,” she says. They passed a tennis court and decided to give it a try. The sport seemed to be a perfect fit for Sabalenka—intense, competitive, and fun. But she admits that the real reason she liked playing tennis was because she sometimes got to skip school. “Honestly, I remember I was waiting for my father to pick me up. I was the first one to leave the school and I was so happy,” she says.

Sabalenka was close to her dad, and he was her biggest influence. She describes him as one of those guys who’s just someone you wanted to be around. “He was so fun. I remember watching him thinking, Oh my God, I want to be like him when I grow up,” she says. “I believe my personality comes from him.”

He, in turn, believed that she would be one of tennis’s greats, and together they dreamed that Sabalenka would win a couple of Grand Slam titles before she turned 25. It became the goal they were fighting for. At first, she played mostly in Belarus, but as she made her way through the developmental circuit and into the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) Tour, things started trending in that direction. She had a breakthrough season in 2018 when she won two titles, was named WTA Newcomer of the Year, and ended the year ranked number 11 in the world—all by the age of 20.

But in 2019, her father passed away suddenly from meningitis at age 43, just as Sabalenka, then 21, cracked the top 10. Suddenly the specter of winning a Grand Slam loomed even larger in her mind. She wanted to keep her promise to her dad. To keep fighting. To honor his memory by putting the family name in the history books.

But, she says, she ended up thinking about winning a Grand Slam title too much.

High expectations weren’t new for Sabalenka. She always expected the best from herself. “I was just all the time under pressure. Not outside pressure. Just because of myself,” she says. She kept looking in the rearview mirror, too, and couldn’t let go of her mistakes, often berating herself on court. How could you miss that? Why did you hit the ball there? But it wasn’t just her internal dialogue that threw her off her game. It was also social media—more specifically, scrolling through and reading the comments people made about her. With every mistake, she’d worry about how other folks perceived her. “I was really leaning towards people’s opinion too much, and I was scared about that too much,” she says.

The pressure got to her most memorably during the 2022 season, which happened to be captured by Netflix’s documentary series Break Point. That year was a literal breaking point for Sabalenka. She couldn’t serve, notching 428 double faults in 55 matches—151 more than any other player on the women’s tour, per The Athletic. She essentially gave points away to her opponent. She felt like people hated her because of Belarus’s involvement in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She was 24 years old and fast approaching her internal deadline to win a Grand Slam. She wanted to quit tennis.

But if there’s one thing about Sabalenka that you should know, it’s that she doesn’t like to back down from a challenge. She thought about her dad and the struggles he faced during his life. “The way he raised me, he always told me that you have to fight. You have to work hard,” she says. But “he was always positive, fun, and he always tried to stay strong.” He was the reason she continued to step onto the court, day after day. She still wanted to make him proud.

So it was back to the drawing board. She had to fine-tune her game and focus on the things she could control, yes, but she was also open to new ideas.

To fix her serve, she completely dismantled it. It turned out that the problem wasn’t in her head, like most people assumed. It was a mechanical issue. If you asked most athletes if they would scrap all the ingrained habits and muscle memory they’d developed over the years and relearn such a key element of their sport, they’d probably scoff and run the other direction. But Sabalenka agreed to try, and she rebuilt her serving motion from the ground up.

Similarly, she had to strip down her beliefs about what it takes to be the best tennis player in the world. When she was younger, she would feel guilty whenever she wasn’t on the court practicing. It was all tennis, all the time. “I believe that was just the way we were raised, [what] our coaches from [an] early age were telling us. ‘You have to work hard. Only tennis. Only tennis. You cannot go out with your friends.’ And I think that really affected a lot of the mentality,” she says.

She realized that she needed to draw a clearer line between her on-the-court and off-the-court lives, that there wasn’t anything inherently bad about having fun. “Whenever I step off the court, I’m like, Okay, the job is done. Now it’s time to enjoy stuff outside of tennis,” she says. A good meal. A cup of coffee with a view. Shopping. A walk in a park. And yes, goofing around with her coaching team on TikTok. By focusing on things that bring her joy, she could disconnect from the things that might bring stress or disappointment. She could recharge instead.

“Just understand that life is hard, but at the same time, it’s so simple. You just have to try to stay in the moment and enjoy whatever you’re going through,” she says. “I think the challenges I face really helped me to understand that a little bit better.”

That doesn’t mean that she doesn’t still get upset during a match, as her experiences in Stuttgart and Rome showed. She’s human, after all. And female athletes are often scrutinized more than male athletes when they show their emotions during competition—particularly anger or frustration—which adds another layer of stress to an already high-stakes situation.

“I feel like people should take it easier on women in this case, and that [it] is tough to be a lady all the time, especially for athletes who are under pressure and dealing with so many things,” she says via email when asked after the Italian Open if female and male athletes are held to differing standards for their on-court conduct.

And bottling up emotions can be counterproductive, allowing them to grow and fester. That’s when she gives herself permission to yell at her coaches—she says they made an agreement that “it’s nothing personal”—or maybe take it out on her racket. By expelling the excess emotion, she can then recalibrate.

“Mental health is very important. Sometimes [it] is better to throw [emotions] out instead of holding inside. [It’s] not something I’m proud of, but I think if I’d hold it a bit longer, I’d struggle even more in my head,” she says in her email.

As she explains to me in April, getting it all out allows her to start again fresh, from the beginning. “You have to [allow] yourself to throw it out if you need to. Not every time, but when it’s too much inside, you have to let it go.”

Unsurprisingly, when she started to shift her mentality toward tennis, her game improved. “I was feeling better on court. I was more energetic. I was balanced with my thoughts, with the body, with everything,” she says. “And that was the moment when everything just clicked together.”

She started off the 2023 season with a win at the Australian Open, at last securing her first Grand Slam title a few months before her 25th birthday, fulfilling her promise to her dad. But the next year, 2024, was yet again fraught with multiple challenges, including the death of her ex-boyfriend, former NHL player Konstantin Koltsov. Yet Sabalenka successfully defended her title in Melbourne and added a US Open trophy to her collection, dedicating the win to her family. She ended the season ranked number one in the world.

Sabalenka has worked hard to reach this point in her career, but she credits her team—which includes her coach Anton Dubrov, fitness coach Jason Stacy, and hitting partner Andrei Vasilevski—for her success and her well-being. She’s not shy about singing their praises. In March, at the press conference following her loss to then 17-year old Mirra Andreeva in the finals at Indian Wells, she said, “Talking about me [at Mirra’s age], I was surrounded by so many wrong people. Finally, when I was able to get rid of those people and I, how to say, surrounded myself with the right people, you have more confidence and everything is more calm, and the atmosphere on the team is very healthy.”

They make her work hard too. When we speak in April, she’s getting recovery treatment after she finished her session on the tennis court—her second of the day. And that’s after a stint in the gym working on her strength, fitness, and mobility. It’s mostly bodyweight exercises, working “so my core and everything is connected and balanced,” she says. Generally she steers away from heavy lifting because her “muscles react quickly” and it doesn’t leave her feeling her best on court.

I ask her if it’s hard, if there’s any workouts she doesn’t love. “Of course it’s tough, physically and mentally, but I love it,” she tells me. “I know why I’m doing that. I know the purpose behind [it], so it makes it easier.”

While Sabalenka’s evolution has led her to career breakthroughs, the most satisfying change may be her relationship with her fans. They often assumed that the Sabalenka they saw on the court—the aggressive athlete with tons of raw power—was who she was off it too. “I think that’s why people, not like they didn’t really like me, but they didn’t really feel connected with me,” she says. “One day I just decided I have to show my personality. I wanted to share my life with people.”

She feels a difference when she walks onto a court to play now. More love. More support. “I feel that I have goosebumps,” she says, especially when she sees kids in the stands with posters or a little girl dressed like her—down to the image of a tiger head temporarily tattooed on the arm.

Instead of worrying about naysayers on social media, Sabalenka is able to focus on herself and play her own game. “From every match, people will find something bad and something good,” she says. “You have to focus on people who support you. Why would I waste my energy on people who hate me? It’s their problem.”

Toward the end of our conversation, Sabalenka tells me that sometimes, when she wins a tournament, she stands there with the trophy and is hit by a memory. It’s a throwback to when she was practicing in the tennis academy in Belarus. She’s maybe 15 years old and has no idea if she’ll make it in the world of professional tennis. “I have this moment of appreciation to myself, that I stayed there, and I didn’t quit,” she says.

It’s the lesson that her father taught her. It’s the lesson that she’s reminded of every time she looks at the tiger tattooed on her forearm. And it’s also one she hopes she can one day share with her own kids too.

“I’d like to have a family,” she says, “and come back. I want my baby to see me working hard, working hard for something.” She wants them to understand that “nothing gets to them in life if they’re not working for it and dedicating their lives for something”—just like she learned from her dad. “I really believe that they see that [at a young age] and it somehow stays in their minds,” she says.

Starting a family, though, isn’t something she’s thinking about anytime soon, she emphasizes. But she wants to pass on the lesson to the next crop of tennis players, spectators, and potential fans regardless.

“Like every athlete, of course I want to win as [many] tournaments as possible, but at the same time, I just want to help people to be strong,” she says. “And I hope that I’m helping people, and that’s the main goal.”

Photographer: César Buitrago
Stylist: Carolina Orrico
Hair: Gianluca Mandelli
Makeup: Bo Champagne
Production: Select Services
Location: Riverset Studios

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