Aussie Open champ Sabalenka rewarded

She reworked her serve and her belief for major triumph.

Aryna Sabalenka’s Australian Open championship is about persistence: the value of confronting, not ignoring, problems, and putting in the time and the effort required to get better.

And, to hear Sabalenka and her team tell it, it’s as much about the way she reconfigured her self-belief as it is about the way she reconfigured her serving technique.

“I always had this weird feeling when people would come to me and ask for a signature. I would be like, ‘Why are you asking for (my) signature? I’m nobody. I’m a player. I don’t have a Grand Slam,’” Sabalenka said after that last phrase no longer applied because she had defeated Elena Rybakina 4-6, 6-2, 6-3 in the final Saturday night.

“I just changed how I feel. I start (to) respect myself more,” Sabalenka continued, between celebratory sips of bubbly. “I start to understand that, actually, I’m here because I work so hard and I’m actually a good player.”

That goes a long way, especially when the going gets tough under the bright lights and on the big stage of a major tournament. “Every time I had a tough moment on court,” the 24-year-old from Belarus said, “I was just reminding myself that I’m good enough to handle all this.”

There were plenty of those moments over the years — and against Rybakina, who won Wimbledon last year and was the first woman in 22 years to beat three past Slam champions to get to the Australian Open final.

Then, there was the double-fault on the very first point, the double-fault nearly 2½ hours later on Sabalenka’s first of what would be four match points, the loss of the first set, and so on.

But Sabalenka’s retooled serve ended up producing 17 aces, more than enough to outweigh seven double-faults, and her 51 winners helped propel her to three pivotal breaks.

A year ago in Melbourne, Sabalenka double-faulted 15 times in a fourth-round exit. That set the tone for a season in which she led the tour with 400 double-faults, sometimes more than 20 in a match.

“She was kind of, like, afraid just to talk about it,” said her coach, Anton Dubrov.

He and Sabalenka’s fitness coach, Jason Stacy, kept trying to get her to reconstruct her serve. She resisted. Things got tough. Dubrov thought about quitting. But they all stuck with it.

She is 11-0 in 2023 and will move up to No. 2 in the rankings today.

ASANKA BRENDON RATNAYAKE/AP Aryna Sabalenka plays a backhand to Elena Rybakina in the Australian Open singles final Saturday. “Every time I had a tough moment on court,” Sabalenka said, “I was just reminding myself that I’m good enough to handle all this.”.