It has been the year of the winning streak.
On the men’s side, Novak Djokovic started the season by reeling off 20 straight victories before Daniil Medvedev, himself in the middle of what would become a 19-match unbeaten run, defeated the Serb in Dubai.
For the women, Aryna Sabalenka led the way, racking up 13 straight wins – including a first grand slam title at the Australian Open – until she ran into an inspired Barbora Krejcikova. That was also in Dubai, where Krejcikova ended another small but significant streak, denying Iga Swiatek a seventh consecutive win just as the Pole was beginning to resemble the player who was a month into a 37-match winning run this time last year.
Now it is the turn of Carlos Alcaraz and Elena Rybakina, the winners in Indian Wells 10 days ago, and the hottest tickets in town at the Miami Open as they go in search of the elusive “sunshine double”.
Having ended Medvedev’s triumphal march in southern California, Alcaraz, the world No 1 and US Open champion, is now on a nine-match winning streak of his own. The latest addition to that sequence came in the shape of a 6-4, 6-4 victory over Tommy Paul that moved him into the quarter-finals, three wins away from defending the title he won last year against Norway’s Casper Ruud. Next up is Taylor Fritz, the big-serving American whom he succeeded as Indian Wells champion, who saw off seventh seed Holger Rune 6-3, 6-4.
“I have never played against him, so it’s going to be really tough, you know, new opponent for me, new, let’s say, style of game for me.
“But I’m going to be focused on me, just on me, to play my game, you know, to have a lot of time to enjoy, to play relaxed, to smile on court. That’s the key [to] everything for me.”
Rybakina, meanwhile, the Wimbledon champion and 10th seed, swept past Italy’s Martina Trevisan 6-3, 6-0 to notch up a dozen straight wins. For the moment, Alcaraz is undoubtedly the fresher of the pair. While the Spaniard has yet to drop a set over the sunshine swing, Rybakina’s path has been fraught with difficulty. In the final rounds of Indian Wells, the 23-year-old overcame Swiatek and Sabalenka, the world’s top two players. Five days later, as she got her Miami campaign underway with a battling three-set win over Russia’s Anna Kalinskaya, she looked weary. Then she ran into Paula Badosa for the second time in a fortnight and became wearier still, delivering an error-strewn performance that saw her teeter on the brink before a match point was saved and another deciding set won.
With so much tennis in her legs, a relatively straightforward win over Trevisan was just what the doctor ordered. The Italian, seeded 25th and playing well enough to defeat Jelena Ostapenko in straight sets in the previous round, fought gamely in the early stages but lacked the firepower to trouble Rybakina, who underlined her superiority with 10 aces. It was the fourth match in a row in which she has hit double figures in that category, a useful habit to have when it comes to conserving energy. Rybakina did not land her booming first serve as often as she would have liked, but she invariably found it when it most mattered.
“Of course, I feel that I’m not the freshest,” said Rybakina. “[It] would be better to feel better on the courts physically, but this is something I have to play with, and for now [I’m] getting through, which I’m happy with.
“I would say that maybe I’m moving not as good as I was moving in Indian Wells, but overall I think that I’m trying to keep that level from Indian Wells. There are a lot of ups and downs, but I think overall it’s not bad.
“Even being not fresh, you still need to push yourself to find these moments in the match where it can turn around, which is not easy to always to do, but I think for now I’m managing.
“Even today I didn’t serve that well, the percentage of the first serve [54%], but in these important moments like 30-30, 30-40 or something like this, I was serving [an] ace. So I think it’s just important to find these moments and to push, and for now [I’m] doing well even being not super fresh.”
Fatigue has done no more to slow her down off the court than it has on it. News emerged this week that the Moscow-born Rybakina has donated roughly $77,000 (£62,327) to support the development of 14 young female players in Kazakhstan, the country she has represented since 2018.
It is a move she first mooted following her victory at the All England Club last summer, when she expressed a desire to give back to a federation that provided vital financial backing at a pivotal moment in her career. At the time, the world’s focus was on her Russian heritage and what it meant for a tournament that had banned Russian and Belarusian players in response to the war in Ukraine. In truth, Rybakina’s altruism is more of a piece with the social awareness shown by other stars of her generation such as Swiatek, Coco Gauff and Naomi Osaka.
“It just happened now, recently, because I was traveling a lot and it’s not easy,” said Rybakina, who won £2m for her Wimbledon win. “We talked with the [Kazakh] federation, since I don’t know the girls that well since I’m traveling all the time. So we talked.
“We decided that, for now, it’s going to be 10 girls, 12 girls, I don’t remember exactly. But it was just [a] big help for me when I started professionally, from the federation, so I was thinking that [this would be a] good way to kind of thank [them] back.
“I think it’s important for the young girls to have some kind of support, since it’s not easy for everyone.”
Alcaraz seems intent on following a similar path, with reports in the Spanish press indicating that the 19-year-old plans to set up a charitable foundation in his native Murcia. Meanwhile, however, there is a title to defend. Victory over Paul, who saved a match point to win their only previous meeting in Montreal last year, was a positive step in that direction. After a competitive opening, Alcaraz broke to love in the fifth game, helped on his way by a trademark piece of athletic brilliance as he somehow chased down an exquisite angled drop shot from Paul, flicking it over the high part of the net to force an error. It was the most spectacular moment in a run of 13 points from a possible 15 that gave the Spaniard the platform for a win that moves him to the brink of a double-digit winning streak. Now he is trying to banish thoughts of following in the footsteps of Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, the two most recent of the seven male winners of the sunshine double.
“It’s something that I really want,” admitted Alcaraz. “I want to be part of the few players that made the sunshine double.
“It would be great to achieve that, but it is something that I do not think about. [I] try to think about day by day, match by match, and that’s all I try to think about.
“But of course it would be great to be part of [those] few, few players.”
To pull it off, Alcaraz will need to match Rybakina’s current mark of 12 straight wins. In a season notable for such runs, it would be another apt addition to the chronicle.