Elena Rybakina – The Future Number One In Russian Tennis?

Elena (Andreyevna) Rybakina was born on June 17, 1999, in Moscow. From a very young age, she started engaging in sports with her older sister, initially focusing on gymnastics and ice skating. After being told that she was too tall to become a professional in either of those sports, she talked with her parents, and they decided that she had to use her time training another sport. Her father played tennis when he was in his late teens but wasn’t good or technically strong enough to pursue a career. Despite that, he loved the sport and followed many of his tennis heroes and their many achievements and games. Consequently, he suggested switching to tennis instead, partly because of his interest in the sport but also knowing that her height could be an asset instead of an obstacle. Rybakina was still very young and began to play tennis at the age of six.

After the beginning of her tennis career and all the initial training, focus on basic skills, movements, and physical training, Rybakina moved from the Dynamo Sports Club to the Spartak Tennis Club, where she was fortunate enough to have several very accomplished coaches. She trained with the former top-100 player Evgenia Kulikovskaya as well as the former top-10 player Andrey Chesnokov. She even had a former World Championship gold medalist in the modern pentathlon, Irina Kiseleva, as one of her fitness coaches. Elena did not get individual training until she became a junior player. Instead, she was practicing in groups with other players for several years. More precisely, in a training group with about eight players until she reached age 15 and after that until she reached 18 in a group of four players.

Elena Rybakina attended a regular high school not specialized for athletes and needed to balance her tennis with schoolwork. Hence, in a couple of years, her time for tennis was limited. Her parents believed it to be essential for her to get an education, even though they focused on tennis as a future career opportunity. Subsequently, she could only play tennis for about two to three hours per day and train in fitness three hours a day. When training in the Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow, Rybakina entered her first ITF junior event aged 14 in Vsevolozhsk, 15 miles east of St. Petersburg. During this tournament, she made the quarterfinal. After that, she advanced through Russia’s plethora of junior events over the next few years, giving her a lot of mental strength and increasing her self-confidence after a lot of good results and play. These young years confirmed her choice to play tennis and made her focus more and more on reaching her goals of becoming the best player possible.

Rybakina, the former world No. 3 junior, began playing on the ITF Junior Circuit in November 2013 when she reached the age of 14. The following March, in 2014, she won her first title at her second career event in the Grade-3 Almetievsk Cup in the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia. After that first win, she stepped up her game and continued to play with even more confidence believing in herself and her chances to achieve her short-term and long-term goals, hence, winning a couple of grade-3 events more. Furthermore, she played her first Grade-2 tennis event at the Ozerov Cup in Moscow in June 2014, where she finished second runner-up taking second place after her compatriot Anna Blinkova. after a well-played game. From the beginning of 2015, she began playing Grade-1 events but didn’t have much success until she eventually reached the final at the Belgian International Junior Championships in May 2015. Rybakina played a great game but nevertheless ended up losing to Katharina Hobgarski.

Later in 2015, Elena Rybakina made her junior-Grand Slam debut at the outdoor hard court championship US Open in New York, where she won the first two matches and reached the third round. Some of the advantages in her game began to get obvious during her 2015 season. When compared with her rivals, Elena Rybakina had a significant edge with her serve, making an average of 50% more aces/service winners than her opponents. Moreover, when her first serve was in, it was unreturned 33% of the time. This ratio was above the general average of the rest of the junior players – and in comparison, even above most of the older and more experienced WTA players. At the beginning of 2016, she started the year losing her opening-round game but came back strong and won the following two Grade-1 titles. The rest of the year was a struggle for her without much success in the junior Grand Slam or other Grade-A single events. Her best result in 2016 was a Grade-A event at the Trofeo Bonfiglio in Italy, alongside Amina Anshba, where they were winning all the way to the finals, eventually losing the last match in an all-Russian final. Elena Rubakina ended the 2016 season just outside the WTA’s top 600.

The 2017 tennis season was Rybakina’s final year on the junior tour. The right-hander opened the year in The Australian Open tournament winning the four first rounds. Marta Kostyuk eventually stopped her in the semifinals. Later that same year, Rybakina met another future WTA star (Iga Swiatek) in the final of the Trofeo Bonfiglio in Milan, but this time, she captured the title. The Russian then managed to win over Amanda Anisimova during a run to the fourth round in French Open in Roland Garros. In the autumn of 2017, while transitioning from junior to senior, Rybakina took Anna Blinkova and Irina Camelia Begu to three sets in ITF events. By now, it was getting clear that Elena Rybakina had the skills to play professionally, but her parents were understandably cautious. Her father still wanted her to go to university, first and foremost in the US, and sought out what opportunities she had. Subsequently, she received some really good offers from various colleges, but bottom line Rybakina wanted to turn professional as soon as possible and remained in her home country. Later in 2017, she finished her junior career playing the initial matches of the ITF Junior Masters tournament, the junior counterpart to the WTA Finals. She won one match in her group and finished in seventh place.

Elena Rybakina made her WTA Tour debut in October 2017 at the Kremlin Cup. She reached the main draw by qualifying but lost in the first round to Irina-Camelia Begu. In February 2018, at her next WTA tournament, Rybakina played a great WTA Tour match against Timea Bacsinszky and won her first WTA match. In the next tournament, she won three sets, after saving a match point in the second set against world No. 7, Caroline Garcia. Despite losing the game, this quarterfinal took her from No. 450 to No. 268 in the world. In March 2018, Rybakina won her first ITF singles title and $15.000 in Kazan, Russia, where she also won the doubles title. In April, the month after, she made her next significant rankings jump, finishing second after Sabina Sharipova at the $60.000 Lale Cup in Istanbul, improving her rankings to No. 215. She finally reached the top 200 for the first time in late May. Rybakina acquired Kazakh citizenship the following month and switched federations to Kazakhstan from Russia. If she agreed to change her nationality, The Kazakhstan Tennis Federation offered her financial support, which she chose instead of various options to play college tennis in the United States. Playing for Kazakhstan, Rybakina entered her first Grand Slam qualifying draw at the US Open tournament but didn’t manage to reach the main draw.

At the beginning of the 2019 season, Elena Rybakina was playing mostly ITF events. She started to play WTA Tour matches primarily in the second half of the season. During the first months of 2109, she won three ITF titles, including the $60.000 Launceston International. She played her WTA Grand Slam debut at the French Open as a qualifier, only to lose to Kateřina Siniaková. Playing her first WTA event on the grass at the Rosmalen Grass Court Championships, she reached her first semifinal. Despite this success in The Netherlands, she lost in the qualifying at Wimbledon. In July, Rybakina got a breakthrough when she won her maiden WTA Tour title in Romania at the Bucharest Open, just before becoming 20 years old. With this title, she finally made her top 100 debut in the WTA rankings at No. 65 in the world. After losing her first-round match in the US Open, she reached the final at the Jiangxi International Open in China, losing the last match to Rebecca Peterson. This result brought gave her another boost to the WTA rankings and got her into the top 50 for the first time. Rybakina finished the year strong at her last three events of the season when she reached at least the quarterfinals. Rybakina finished the 2019 season at No. 37 in the world.

In Elena Rubakina’s 2020 season, she led the WTA Tour winnings in the finals, and she became second in match wins. She started the season by reaching the finals at stunningly four out of five tournaments before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the WTA Tour for more than the next five months. These achievements helped Rybakina climb to No. 17 in the world at the time of the tour shut down, becoming the first Kazakhstani player in the top 20. During the shutdown, she chose to stay in Moscow but didn’t have the opportunity to practice tennis for almost two and a half months. Rybakina eventually resumed her training in Bratislava in Slovakia for six weeks to prepare for the forthcoming tour, which was resumed in New York in August 2020, where she lost her return match against Alexandrova and then recorded a single match win at the US Open. Returning to Europe, she finally defeated Alexandrova at the Italian Open in her third opportunity of the year before losing in a third-round match to Yulia Putintseva. In September, Rybakina managed to reach her fifth final of the year at the Internationaux de Strasbourg and, consequently, her first since the resumption of the tour, losing in the final to No. 5 in the world, Elina Svitolina. Rybakina finished the 2020 season at No. 19 in the world.

A tennis player like Elena Rybakina has a specific game style with her physical characteristics and power. Let’s look into how she plays the game to put herself in a position to win. Rybakina tries to control the game from the back of the court, and her overall game style is primarily between a puncher and a tempo player. From the Puncher side, she has the forehand attacks, and as a result, she makes on average 40% more points with this shot than her rivals. Regarding her tempo side, she has a court position close to the baseline, from where she is utilizing her flat shots and backhand attacks. Being able to attack from both sides, Elena Rybakina is a very aggressive baseliner. She can’t be regarded as an Offensive player at all. At the moment of her career, she is not so effective in winning only 56% of the points. Taking risks on both sides, only 37% of Elena Rybakina’s points are won by the errors of her rivals. This result is below the general average of the WTA players, and as a consequence, she cannot be qualified as a Retriever.

Furthermore, her perhaps strongest weapon is her hard and booming serve. Given her six-foot-tall stature and powerful build, it’s not surprising that Rybakina has a very strong serve. But it’s probably her easy motion and variety of serves that impress her fans the most. When it comes to speed, she is in the territory of Serena Williams and leads the WTA Tour in regards to most aces. Aside from the serve, her backhand is often a potent weapon. Rybakina has a reliable technique on her two-hander that can inject enormous pace either down the line or crosscourt. Her strong forehand has cannon-like qualities but tends to give her more errors. With a build similar to Dinara Safina, Rybakina moves pretty well and occasionally has variety in her game style with a sliced backhand or a drop shot. Moreover, when she attacks on the net, she is a strong volley player. She used to play double for many years, with several tournament victories at the beginning of her career. Rybakina is already at the top of the WTA top 10, and her enormous and powerful serve should push her forward and keep her at the top for years to come.

When being a professional tennis player, it can be important with a good and knowledgeable trainer. In 2018, when she was 18 years old, Rybakina hired Andrei Chesnokov, whom she had already trained with at Spartak Tennis Club, to be her private coach. This was the first time she had an individual coach. Chesnokov only wanted to coach in Moscow and did not travel with her to tournaments. Hence, Rybakina switched coaches to Stefano Vukov in February 2019. Vukov was a former Croatian tennis player who competed mainly on the ITF Futures tour. With him as her first traveling coach, she rapidly improved, rising from just inside the top 200 of the WTA rankings into the top 30 in a year. In regards to endorsements, she has been sponsored by Adidas since the start of 2020 for shoes and clothing. She was previously endorsed by Nike and currently uses a Yonex VCore 100 racket. Additionally, Elena Rybakina has not only earned fame from playing tennis, but her career has earned her slightly over €1.4 million.