By the time she landed in Madrid in mid-April this year, Aryna Sabalenka had polished her game to such a brilliant shine that losing seemed almost impossible. Her famously powerful groundstrokes were hitting the lines perfectly. The angles looked sharper than ever, and her serve felt especially clutch. Never known as a great mover, she had started rushing the net, adding even more pressure to an already overwhelming game. Sabalenka, 28, was playing like she believed she could do anything—and maybe she was right. After years of intense competition for the top spot in women’s tennis, it was starting to look like she might be more than just the world number one (a position she had held for over 70 weeks). She seemed poised to dominate the sport in the way two of her idols did: Serena Williams and, more recently discovered through YouTube videos, Steffi Graf. What’s more, the spring buzz among tennis experts went beyond her unbeatable game. She seemed to be… growing up.
A few weeks earlier, in Indian Wells, California, she had beaten her recent rival and emotional counterpoint, the quiet Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan. Still easy to fluster, still wearing her emotions on her face, with her grunts contrasting with her opponent’s silence, Sabalenka had the crowd on her side. She shouted in frustration, and the stadium cheered back—a call and response. The tournament’s typically knowledgeable audience was happy to see her using that famous intensity to her advantage. “She’s in control,” said the white-haired woman next to me, wearing a “U.S. Open 1997” T-shirt. “She used to waste a lot of energy getting angry. And then she’d lose.”
Two weeks later, in Miami, Sabalenka won the second of the major spring tournaments—a rare tennis achievement known as the Sunshine Double. That same month, she adopted a King Charles spaniel puppy named Ash, after tennis legend Arthur Ashe, and got engaged to Georgios Frangulis, a Greek Brazilian businessman and founder of Oakberry, an acai bowl brand with over 800 stores in more than 50 countries. Carrying two big trophies and wearing a 12-carat oval diamond ring (designed by Frangulis and made by her friend, Miami-based jewelry designer Isabela Grutman), Sabalenka was overjoyed. She told commentators from The Tennis Channel that it was the best month of her life.
Then April came. In Madrid, on the red clay of the Caja Mágica, she lost for the first time in 16 matches. And while clay isn’t her strongest surface—it slows the ball and reduces the power of big shots—she lost in a frustrating way, wasting six match points against young American Hailey Baptiste, ranked 32nd. “That wasn’t an easy one,” Sabalenka says a few days later, sitting in the living room of the largest suite at the Bvlgari Hotel in Rome, where the clay court season has brought her next. “The night I lost, I dreamed about all those match points. I’d dream about a point, then wake up and think about that missed chance.”
The suite, with its row of rooms overlooking the Mausoleum of Augustus, is a peaceful space of beige and gold, decorated with Italian modernist furniture and century-old Gio Ponti ceramics. Sabalenka looks cozy after practice in a brown NikeSkims zip-up and pale yellow Nike sweats, with diamonds sparkling on her neck, earlobes, and ring finger. I’m worried about Ash, whose traveling life has made house training nearly impossible. (So far, it’s been grass-scented pee pads in hotel suites, though Sabalenka says he’s using them faithfully.)
Losses present a champion with a dilemma: brush them off and move on, or study them and figure them out? “It’s a learning process. If I didn’t really care and just thought, ‘Whatever, on to the next one,’ I wouldn’t learn,” she says. “That would be unhealthy. That’s the tough part of being an athlete: you can’t win everything. Your body will, at some point…”You can’t stop me, you can’t limit me. But that’s also the beauty of sport. It’s nice, too, when a young, up-and-coming player beats the world number one. If someone won everything, it wouldn’t exactly be entertaining to watch.” Her rival and predecessor as world number one, Polish player Iga Swiatek, is a master of the game but comes across as robotic on court and shy in press conferences. If Sabalenka has become a star, it’s partly because she understands that tennis can be like opera. To grab your audience, give them human emotions across a full range: triumph and despair, love and heartbreak, grace and slapstick, sin and redemption.
Like many elite athletes, Sabalenka’s story starts with a little girl who had too much energy and not enough ways to burn it off. Born and raised in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, she first picked up a racket at age six. “In our region, the two most popular sports are ice hockey and tennis,” she explains. “My dad chose tennis.” She remembers Minsk, a city of two million people, as safe, quiet, comfortable, and spotless. Littering, she says, “would be considered animal behavior there,” and the neighborhood where she grew up was so secure that she could hang out with friends on the streets until late at night without her mother worrying. Her father, who had been a serious hockey player before a near-fatal motorcycle crash ended his dream of a professional career, ran a successful car repair business. Her mother didn’t work, but she had two university degrees and prioritized her daughters’ education. (Sabalenka has a sister, 11 years younger, who isn’t a tennis player and reportedly finds the sport “so boring.”)
“Until I was maybe 13, we were wealthy,” Sabalenka recalls. “And then my dad struggled. So many setbacks. I watched him struggle many times in his career but always get back up. My parents tried hard to keep things going, and we didn’t really talk about it. But I knew. Parents think we don’t know, but we know.” Sabalenka and her father were especially close, and it’s clear she identifies with his resilience. But he wasn’t the kind of pushy tennis dad that the women’s tour, in particular, has seen countless examples of over the years. “Tennis was fun, and I feel like it’s really important for coaches to keep it fun. He always told me, ‘If you don’t like it, if you want to quit, just tell us. You don’t have to force yourself to do anything.’ There was a time when I was about nine and I was close to giving up. But I saw how proud my dad was of me, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. And then I fell in love with the sport again, much more than before.”
Sabalenka wasn’t exactly a late bloomer, but she wasn’t pushed onto the professional tour at age 15 like many of her peers. She didn’t win her first Women’s Tennis Association main-draw match until she was 19, at Wimbledon. Belarus didn’t have a generous state-sponsored tennis program like China, Russia, or France, and in the early days she struggled to find consistent coaching. “So many coaches told me I was stupid, and that the only thing I could do was hit the ball too hard—that I would never reach the top 100,” she remembers. But Sabalenka came into the orbit of Belarusian businessman Alexander Shakutin, who recognized her potential and provided financial support. They no longer have a professional relationship, and in recent years Shakutin has been controversial, identified as someone close to Belarus’s authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko and sanctioned by the European Union as a result. But Sabalenka remains grateful for his early support. “He was the one who really believed in me. There were other people who believed in me, but he was the one who helped me.”
Sabalenka says her mother told her that when she was a toddler, she would fall on the floor and banShe would keep pushing until she got what she wanted. She’s always been fiery, and she admits with some embarrassment that she used to throw verbal firebombs at her parents. “I was very much a Taurus,” she explains. “Like, if I see a goal, I need to get it, and there’s no other way. This part of my personality can drive me crazy, but it can also push me into fight mode and help me play with passion. It’s two sides of the same coin.”
Sabalenka arrived at a time when the so-called Big Babe era of women’s tennis—a term coined by sports journalist and former pro Mary Carillo to describe the power games of players like Lindsay Davenport, Mary Pierce, and eventually the Williams sisters—was quieting down. Players like Angelique Kerber, Simona Halep, and Ashleigh Barty, who were scrappier and had more versatile all-court games, started winning majors. But then Sabalenka showed up with her six-foot frame and booming groundstrokes. With her intense on-court presence, quick temper, and natural assertiveness, she somehow seemed more Serena than Serena. Smirks, eye rolls, grunts that led chair umpires to accuse her of hindering play, smashed rackets, and tense exchanges with officials have marked her time on tour. For a while, her short fuse seemed to hurt her results. Sabalenka started to develop a reputation for painful losses in high-stakes matches. She has won four Grand Slam finals—and lost four Grand Slam finals. “I would get super emotional all the time,” she says. “I was like, under zero control. I could lead the match, then go totally crazy and let it slip away. I knew I had a problem.”
PRINTS AND REPEAT
“It’s okay to throw the racket,” says Sabalenka, dressed in a Gucci dress and heels, wearing her own ring. “It’s okay to yell. It’s okay to go nuts. Sometimes you just need to let it out… so you’re ready to start over and play the match.” She’s wearing an Audemars Piguet watch.
Although she worked with a psychologist from ages 18 to 24—a transformative experience that gave her self-regulation techniques and, most importantly, a way to talk herself through intense moments—Sabalenka would be the first to say she’s a work in progress. While she was ranked number one for all 52 weeks of 2025, that season was also full of headline-grabbing incidents, as if she were struggling to adjust to the pressure of being the tour’s undisputed leader. In the Australian Open final in January, she was seen smashing her racket on court just before the winner’s trophy was presented to Madison Keys. After losing to Coco Gauff in the French Open final in June, Sabalenka told reporters that the American “won the match not because she played incredible, just because I made all those mistakes on… easy balls.” In October, at the Wuhan Open, while losing a semifinal match to Jessica Pegula, she threw her racket in frustration. It bounced up and nearly hit a ball kid, leading to a warning for “racket abuse” from the chair umpire.
Her outbursts haven’t been limited to losses. In Miami this March, during the final she went on to win against Gauff, a spectator shouted “out!” in the middle of a point, earning a warning from the umpire. Sabalenka, frustrated, yelled “shut up!” into the crowd and received an obscenity warning—a reverse call and response. During the trophy presentation, she praised her opponent, then looked into the crowd and said, “Where are you, that lady who yelled, who hoped for the out? I shouldn’t have been that rude—but come on, you can’t do that. So let’s agree that we were both wrong. Sorry.”
There has long been a hint of a double standard when it comes to showing emotion in women’s tennis, and old-fashioned ideas about what is “ladylike” still pop up in fan forums and even among some commentators. (Serena Williams facedSimilar criticisms have been aimed at her—for how loudly she shrieks, the shape of her body, her temper, and the way she acts when she loses. The internet has also taken a nasty pleasure in imagining rivalries between female players. Sabalenka and Gauff quickly shut that down when they teamed up for a TikTok video, dancing together in their tennis whites on Wimbledon’s Centre Court just days after the French Open drama. By then, Sabalenka had already publicly apologized to Gauff for what happened in that infamous press conference. To her credit, she’s really good at something Williams never quite mastered: the public apology. And for every fan she pushes away, there’s another who sees a genuine person in those apologies—someone real among all the fame and pretense.
“When I got to Wimbledon last year, my first press conference was packed,” Sabalenka recalls. “I was like, ‘Wow, guys, are you expecting more of the French Open?’ But then we made the TikTok video. Coco is one of those girls who gets it. She never gets upset or offended. If you say you’re sorry, she’s like, ‘Oh, girl, it’s okay. You’re good.’ No one understands you better than another athlete. I think we all feel like, okay, I should win every match. If you’re not thinking that way, what are you even doing? When you’re in the top five and winning Grand Slams, it’s not okay to be okay with losing. That’s my mentality.”
STRONG STATEMENT
“Aryna has learned that emotions are information. These days, she can take that information and handle it better. It’s the shift from fighter to warrior,” says her fitness trainer, Jason Stacy. She’s wearing a Gucci swimsuit and heels.
Sabalenka met her best friend on tour, Paula Badosa, at an exhibition match before the Indian Wells tournament in 2022. Fans call them Sabadosa, and they’ve shared their love of dancing in many TikTok videos. But Badosa, who is Spanish, is trying to get Sabalenka into Latin music. (The Belarusian has been listening to a lot of Justin Bieber lately, while the Spaniard has Bad Bunny on repeat.) “I’ve seen a big change in her,” Badosa says. “Three or four years ago, it was harder for her to control her emotions. She didn’t know when to let them out and when to hold back. Aryna will always be very intense on the court. But she’s also really sensitive. She has a big, big heart. She always jokes that she’s a tiger, and she has that tiger tattoo on her arm. But I always say, off the court, she’s a teddy bear. She’s very affectionate, and she takes care of her people.”
Even though she’s been accused of using apologies to brush off her mistakes, spending time with Sabalenka shows how different the player is from the person. Off the court, she’s light, relaxed, and self-deprecating—open and thoughtful. It makes sense that once the match is over, this version of her might look back at the other with some regret. “You have to accept that you’ve been wrong,” she says, then laughs. “And I’ve been wrong so many times.” But she pushes back against the idea that a fiery temper is always bad. In fact, she believes in it. “When I was young, I would get emotional, and then I’d get really mad at myself for getting emotional. Now I understand that it’s okay to throw the racket. It’s okay to yell something. It’s okay to go crazy if you feel like you’re holding too much in. Sometimes you just need to let it out, to clear it so you’re ready to start over and play the match. Yeah, sometimes it looks ugly and terrible, but I need it to stay focused.”
Sabalenka’s huge popularity suggests fans agree with her that the ugly and terrible can make for exciting tennis. She’s second only to Gauff in earnings from brand endorsements.Her sponsors include Nike, watchmaker Audemars Piguet, and, as of this January, Gucci. The prestigious Italian fashion house is very selective with its brand ambassadors; in tennis, that has meant only Sabalenka and the men’s world number one, Jannik Sinner. In March, she sat in a particularly interesting front row at Gucci’s Milan Fashion Week show, alongside Shawn Mendes, Romeo Beckham, Donatella Versace, and the young Formula 1 driver Kimi Antonelli. She has twice as many Instagram followers as any other active female tennis pro. Intensity, authenticity, humor, and glamour—Sabalenka’s off-court success shows that these qualities are just as valuable as a powerful first serve.
“People know when you’re being authentic, being your true self,” says her fiancé, Frangulis. “There’s always going to be something tricky in a match, because Aryna will say what she feels. And she does the same on Instagram and TikTok. That makes her special. But I’ve always told her that to stay composed, she needs to focus on the facts, on what’s actually happening, and not on whatever comes into her mind. And the fact is, she’s the best in the game, and she can always handle it, always bounce back and get it done. It’s not about getting rid of those emotions. It’s about using them to her advantage—turning them into one of her superpowers instead of her weakness.”
Big personalities attract both big fans and big critics, and Sabalenka knows she’s not everyone’s cup of tea. That’s fine with her. “With a lot of love, a lot of attention, and a lot of success, there’s always going to be people who judge you,” she says. “They judge your looks, your grunting, your nationality, even your private life and your choices. I don’t scroll much, but sometimes I’ll see random comments on Instagram, TikTok, or Threads, and I’ll ask my manager, ‘Do people really hate me that much?’ Then I go into the stadium and feel so much support, and I realize that on the internet, it’s just a few people, but they’re very loud. Sometimes it’s a fake account, and I think, ‘You don’t even have the guts to show your face?’ Or sometimes I click on the profile and see it’s a mother with three kids, a happy family living a very conventional, perfect life. And the stuff she’s messaging you is, ‘I want you to die, I want your family to get cancer, you’re a whore.’ And I think: There’s something wrong with this planet.”
Perhaps the harshest criticism has been about her Belarusian identity since the war in Ukraine began. Since 2022, Belarus has been Russia’s key ally and a launchpad for its attacks. Some fellow players have accused Sabalenka of openly supporting the war; others have criticized her for not using her platform to condemn it more strongly. Sabalenka has made it clear that she does not support the war, or any war, and that sports should rise above politics, focusing on bringing people together rather than dividing them, on competition rather than conflict.
“Not shaking hands—I respect that position,” she says, referring to the decision by some players, including Ukraine’s Elina Svitolina, not to shake hands after matches with Russian and Belarusian athletes. “I know it’s not personal. They’re sending a message. But it was tough, the amount of hate I was getting from people on tour. One coach went crazy on me, saying I’m the one dropping the bombs. It’s obvious that I want peace for everyone. I don’t want this war to happen. They should sit down at the table and, through negotiations, figure things out. But I also think that sports is a platform and a place where we can come together, not fight each other like we’re having our own war. Get together, be together, show peace. For so long, Ukrainians and Belarusians were like brothers and sisters. We’re the same.””We’re all tied close together. And now there’s a huge wall between us, and I don’t know if it’s ever going away.”
In 2019, when Sabalenka was 21, her father died suddenly from meningitis. It was November, the offseason, and she was training in Minsk. As she remembers it, on the day he got sick, her mother called an ambulance, but the medics brought down his fever and left him at home. She called again the next day, with the same result. “I was like, let me just carry him to the hospital myself if the ambulance won’t take him,” Sabalenka recalls. “They took him on the third day, and it was too late. It was even harder for my mom. And I didn’t realize until later how much my sister suffered. We were both daddy’s little girls.”
Though she has grown closer to her mother in recent years, her father had been the main pillar of her support system. She called him whenever she was struggling, personally or professionally, and his words had a way of making things better. When he died, only training took her mind off her grief. “People say that time helps, but in some ways I struggle more now because I know how much fun my dad would be having with my success,” she says. “These days, my fiancé will find me crying in bed at night because I’m watching Reels and there’s something about a father, or old times. The videos that hit me hardest are when I see people posting a family’s reaction to their kid athlete winning something, and I just imagine how my dad would react to me. I’m crying like crazy, like I just lost him. There are so many fathers on tour, and when I see a healthy relationship and a proud dad, I think, Girl, just enjoy it, because you never know what’s coming. You’re so lucky.”
Not long before her father died, Sabalenka hired Jason Stacy as her fitness trainer. That title doesn’t come close to describing his role on a team that is especially close-knit, in a sport where top players often describe their traveling teams as families. To Sabalenka, Stacy is, she says, “like a father.” The longest-serving member of a group that spends 330 days a year together and its elder statesman (he’s just a bit older than Sabalenka’s father would be if he were alive), Stacy has been key to her recovery from losses on and off the court. “I always tell her, don’t fight it, and don’t feed it,” he says of those losses. Stacy, who was homeless as a teenager before a life-changing introduction to martial arts, has taught Sabalenka some of the core ideas of Zen Buddhism. These include Zanshin, a relaxed awareness; Mushin, mental clarity; and Tomaranu Kokoro, a spirit that is always moving. “Aryna’s learned how emotions are information. These days she can take that information and process it better. It’s the progression from fighter to warrior. She was that young fighter, running on adrenaline, just surviving the moment. Warriors are calmer. They can zoom out and then zoom back in and refocus on the right thing.”
Sabalenka suffered another loss in March 2024, when her ex-boyfriend, hockey player Konstantin Koltsov, died by apparent suicide in Miami. She was on the practice courts in Miami, the closest thing Sabalenka has to a home base, when police came to tell her the news. “I was fighting with the cop—like, I couldn’t accept it,” she remembers. Again Sabalenka tried to lose herself in her game. She started playing in the Miami Open a few days later, but lost in the third round to Ukraine’s Anhelina Kalinina, smashing her racket and canceling her press conference. As if Koltsov’s death wasn’t painful enough, online haters came out to criticize Sabalenka for returning to the court so quickly. “I don’t know if there’s any rule about how you’re supposed to grieve,” she says. “I feel like in this situation, there is no right or wrong. We all need different things. For me, going back to work is the only way.””Just like that. I’m 28, but sometimes I feel like I’ve already experienced everything life could throw at you.”
Around this time, Frangulis and Sabalenka were becoming a couple. They first met the previous fall in Dubai, when she signed a sponsorship deal with Oakberry. By the time they had dinner the following spring in Indian Wells, Frangulis says they were somewhere between business colleagues and romantic partners. They’re both global citizens: Frangulis’s company is headquartered in Miami, with a back office in São Paulo and his main European office in Madrid. Dating a professional athlete comes with logistical challenges, but Frangulis says he now plans his travel around hers, and it works for both of them.
On the day we talk, he’s just returned to Rome from Corsica, where he watched French soccer club Le Mans FC—which he partly owns—play its last match of the season. The previous morning, Sabalenka suffered a surprise defeat in her third-round match at the Italian Open. “Aryna is very upset,” he says. “For me, it’s about being there but also giving her space to clear her head. She’s a killer, she’s the best, but sometimes it takes her 24 hours to remember that. My goal is to go along with whatever she wants, but if she wants to spend the whole day in her hotel room, I tell her we can’t just stay here like someone has died. So tonight, we’re going out for some pasta.”
Like many top athletes, Sabalenka has personal rituals at every tournament. In Rome, one of those is the amatriciana at Taverna Trilussa in Trastevere, where she’s been known to arrive by Lime scooter for dinner with her team. When life outside the arena is rich, the losses seem to sting less. There’s a wedding to plan—Greece, summer of 2027, she’s thinking. When the topic of marriage comes up, Sabalenka is probably not the first fiancée to look down at her engagement ring with wonder that life’s cruel show can’t overshadow. Maybe the ring is both a reward and a comfort.
“I see a bit of my father in him, and I absolutely love it,” she says of Frangulis. “You know, I told him, ‘I’m a grown woman, and my hand is big, so a small ring would look very… small.'” Luckily, there’s no rule against big, dazzling jewelry on the tennis court—even if it might lead to another hindrance call. “That’s the whole idea—especially if you’re playing a night match and the lights hit it. Then it’s like, right in their eyes.”
In this story: hair, Sandy Hullett; makeup, Mark Carrasquillo; manicurist, Koko Etsuko Shimatani; tailor, Sara Lassalle.
Produced by That One Production. Location: Faena Miami Beach.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the hypothetical Vogue May 2026 digital cover story featuring Aryna Sabalenka titled Aryna Sabalenka Keeps Pushing Forward
General Background Questions
Q Who is Aryna Sabalenka
A She is a professional tennis player from Belarus currently ranked as one of the top women in the world She is known for her powerful serve and aggressive playing style
Q What is the Vogue May 2026 digital cover story about
A The story titled Aryna Sabalenka Keeps Pushing Forward explores her journey after winning multiple Grand Slams how she handles pressure her personal growth off the court and her mindset for the future
Q Why is this story called Keeps Pushing Forward
A It reflects Sabalenkas resilience She has faced tough losses personal challenges and the pressure of being a top player but she never stops working hard and moving ahead
OnCourt Career Questions
Q What are Sabalenkas biggest achievements so far
A She has won multiple Grand Slam titles reached the world No 1 ranking and is known for dominating on hard courts
Q How does she handle nerves during big matches
A In the interview she explains she uses breathing techniques focuses on the present point and reminds herself that she has done the hard work in practice
Q What is her playing style like
A She is an aggressive baseliner She hits the ball extremely hard especially her serve and forehand and tries to end points quickly
Personal Mindset Questions
Q What does Sabalenka say about her life off the court
A She talks about finding balancespending time with family her love for dogs and learning to switch off from tennis to protect her mental health
Q How has she changed as a person since becoming a champion
A She says she has become more patient less hard on herself and more open about her emotions Shes learned that winning doesnt fix everything
Q Does she talk about her past struggles in the interview