WTA FINALS
In her third appearance, Elena Rybakina emerged as the new singles champion, defeating Aryna Sabalenka 6–3, 7–6 (0) to capture her first WTA Finals crown and 10th career title.
Veronika Kudermetova and Elise Mertens won the doubles trophy once more with a 7-6 (4), 6-1 win over Timea Babos and Luisa Stefani, three years after their 2022 title.
Sabalenka likes to say that no one can overpower her, and 98% of the time she’s right. But not today. While the 6-3, 7-6(0) scoreline was fairly close, the stats from the match tell a more one-sided story. Rybakina hit 13 aces, and led Sabalenka by an astonishing 36 to 12 in the winner count. Rybakina was also 10 of 12 at net, she wasn’t broken once, and she was flawless in the most pressure-filled moment of the match, the second-set tiebreaker. Even when she was up 6-0 in the breaker, she said she wasn’t taking any chances.
“I was trying to stay very focused,” Rybakina said. “I think even in the tiebreak, only when I heard the ‘game, set, match,’ then I realized that the match is finished, because I had also experience being, being up in the tiebreak and losing it. So honestly, I was just focusing really.”