Updated Saturday, January 27, 2024-16:12

  • Chronicle Sabalenka defeats Qinwen in the final of the Australian Open and presents her candidacy to dominate tennis

A broken tennis player. Two years ago, at the WTA 250 in Adelaide, a tournament prior to the Australian Open, Belarusian

Aryna Sabalenka

sat on her bench and began to hyperventilate. "Are you okay?" the chair umpire asked. "I can't serve, I can't serve," she replied. She did not suffer any injuries, in fact she did not ask for medical assistance: she was suffering an anxiety attack. To the stupefaction of her rival, the Swedish Rebecca Peterson, Sabalenka chained one double fault after another, one double fault after another, until she had 21, with another 40 unforced errors. She got to spooning for an entire point before breaking on a break.

This Saturday, that same player, Sabalenka, won her second consecutive Australian Open with a barely seen superiority. During the tournament she did not give up a single set and only conceded 31 games to her rivals, numbers that not even

Serena Williams

showed off this century - her record, 43 games conceded in 2017 -. In the final, the Belarusian won 6-3 and 6-2 against the Chinese

Zheng Qinwen

in one hour and 16 minutes of play and confirmed her figure: at 25 years old, number two in the WTA ranking, she is already prepared to respond to the dominance of the Polish

Iga Swiatek

, number one. Now she is a full tennis player.

A kiss on the bald head

"Without my team it would be impossible to be here. I put a lot of pressure on them a few weeks ago in Brisbane [she lost in the final and said her team had done a bad job] and they have responded," Sabalenka said after receiving the trophy from

Evonne Goolagong.

, the Australian who won the Grand Slam just 50 years ago. "Should I continue speaking to them in English? They're not going to understand me," the Belarusian woman later asked while her technicians burst out laughing. In fact, one of them, her physical trainer,

Jason Stacy

, re-signed his bald head after the victory, an internal superstition. With her help Sabalenka has transformed her game in recent times until she is the player that she is.

Devastating, very hard, lethal. Her tennis had always been powerful, with direct hits, but until last year she had the upper hand. Rather than getting angry like other players, Sabalenka went down when she failed. Her main problem was haste, wanting to win too quickly, but that is no longer the case. "I am a tennis player and a much more mature person. I worked a lot to achieve it. I went crazy on the court and I didn't enjoy the process, I just wanted to win," the Belarusian confessed this week, who had a psychologist on her team for a time. . "He gave me good tools, but I expected him to solve my problems. So I took the reins of my career," she proclaimed.

The walk that changed his life

From Minsk, the capital of Belarus, his relationship with tennis is casual, not at all familiar. When she was six years old she was walking with her father

Sergey

, an ice hockey player, they saw some rinks, they went in to try it and they both liked it. Student of Sports Sciences at the Belarusian State University, his emergence on the circuit came from the Belgian Elise Mertens, a doubles specialist, with whom he won the 2019 US Open. Then, after joining the popular protests in his country against President

Alexander Lukashenko

, he moved to Miami and his individual career also took off. Her shame was that her father couldn't see him.

In November 2019, he died at the age of 43 due to a heart attack and left Sabalenka in a sea of ​​doubts. They were the most complicated moments of his progression: he linked majestic matches with moments of panic. After her came her first Grand Slam, last year in Australia, and her candidacy to dominate the WTA circuit.

His "no" to war

With a huge teenage tattoo of a tiger on his arm - because he was born in 1998 and in China it was the year of the tiger - in recent times he has also stood out for trying to mediate with the Ukrainian tennis players, especially with

Marta Kostyuk

, the most belligerent against the presence of Russians and Belarusians in the tournament.

"I don't support the war. How could I support the war? If I could I would stop it. Unfortunately it is not my responsibility. Likewise, I understand that you don't want to shake my hand," he said last year at Roland Garros after a match against Kostyuk in the that there was no final greeting. Semifinalist in every Grand Slam last year, this season is Sabalenka's season, from a broken tennis player to a full tennis player.