“I just wanted to let it go”: Sabalenka explains the racquet, and refuses to have it called a weakness
Aryna Sabalenka broke a racquet seconds after losing the US Open final and then explained why she had to: hold that in, she said, and she would not have been able to speak afterwards.
Aryna Sabalenka, US Open 2026 | © Zuma / PsNewz
Aryna Sabalenka smashed a ball into the crowd during the US Open final and broke a racquet on the bench the moment it was over. She lost 6-4, 5-7, 6-2 to Elena Rybakina, and with it a title she had won twice, a run of 19 consecutive wins at the tournament and the world No. 1 ranking she had held for 99 consecutive weeks.
Asked in the interview room what had been going through her mind when she did it, she did not apologize for any of it. She described a decision.
“It’s really tough to control your emotions when you lose in the final of the Grand Slam and when you were trying to go for three-peat,” she said. “So I just wanted to let it go, because if I would hold it inside, right now or here or there on the court, I wouldn’t be able to say a word or I would just go not really nice over there. So I just wanted to let all of that aggression and disappointment go outside.”
The question she would not take
The next question put a theory to her: “I think a lot of times people would think that experience and playing a lot of finals make things easier. I’m wondering for you if it starts making it tougher when you feel like it’s something, ‘Oh, no, I’ve lost these before, it’s going to hurt, it’s sort of a bad feeling’?”
She refused the premise in eleven words.
“You’re thinking too much,” she said. “I was just out there competing, trying to do my best with what I had there today. Not good enough.”
There is a tension in what she said that she made no attempt to resolve. Her first answer of the night, on the level she had produced, was unsparing. “I’m obviously not really happy with the level I played today, but she served incredible. She played really aggressive, great tennis. She was simply a better player today than me.”
Less than a minute later, asked what she takes from a tournament in which she reached a fourth consecutive final, she said the opposite.
“Overall I should be happy with the level I played, and there’s lots of things to take from this tournament,” she said. “As experience shows, that I only come back stronger, and all of these lessons this season definitely already made me stronger, but definitely going to motivate me for the next year to do better job.”
Sabalenka will not be world No. 1 on Monday for the first time since October 2024. Asked how many weeks she had held it, she did not know. Told it was 99, she laughed. “Well, that’s amazing. Let’s see if Elena can beat me in that. She continue to play like that, then yeah, I’m in trouble.”
