When a moment the All England Club must have been dreading finally materialised, there was no hint of triumphalism from its architect. Elena Rybakina, born and raised in Moscow but a Kazakh citizen since 2018, walked calmly to the net and shook hands with Ons Jabeur. She had just beaten the Tunisian 3-6, 6-2, 6-2 to claim her first grand slam title, but you would barely have known it.
Rybakina, the first player from Kazakhstan to win a major, acknowledged the Centre Court crowd with a brief wave and then returned to her seat. The obligatory climb to the players’ box was performed belatedly, and almost apologetically. Her coach, Stefano Vukov, described her afterwards as a humble perfectionist. That felt about right.
Others may seek to make political capital from this win, following the tournament’s decision to ban Russian and Belarusian players. Rybakina, however, prefers to let her tennis do the talking. And how eloquent it was, as she gradually imposed her powerful game on Jabeur to become the first woman to recover from a set down in a Wimbledon final since Amélie Mauresmo in 2006.
Any doubts over how Rybakina really felt about her triumph were dispelled at her press conference, where she dissolved into tears when asked how her absent parents would react to the victory.
“Probably they’re going to be super proud,” said the 23-year-old, before taking a moment to compose herself. “You wanted to see emotion. Kept it too long.”
It was an unexpected display of vulnerability from Rybakina, who had earlier explained that her muted reaction in the immediate aftermath of victory was down to a mixture of surprise and exhaustion.
“I didn’t know what to do. It was shocking,” she said. “We worked a lot to be here where I am right now, but it’s so unexpected these two weeks would happen. It was such a tough match mentally and physically, so in the end I was just super happy that it finished. In this moment, I just didn’t believe that I made it. For sure I’m going to celebrate with my team, with my friends and family.
“I’m always very calm. I don’t know what happened, but when I was giving a speech at the end, I was thinking, ‘I’m going to cry right now’, but somehow I held it.”
That was more than Jabeur could manage. By the end, Tunisia’s unofficial minister of happiness was inconsolable.
Jabeur, the first Arab player in history to reach a major final, and the first African woman to do so since 1960, began like she was on a mission. The 27-year-old has long since become accustomed to shouldering the hopes of a country, a people and a continent, and for a set she seemed on course to channel all those years of accumulated passion into a momentous triumph.
But the emotional intensity Jabeur brought to Centre Court seemed to consume her. She is wont to play with a smile on her face but, having started the contest at a heightened pitch, she struggled to handle the setbacks that followed with her usual equanimity. After she was broken in the the opening game of the second set, she headed away a loose ball and played a crowd-pleasing tweener, a shot played through the legs and facing away from the court. In truth, though, she was in no mood for jocularity.
“I wanted, really bad, that title,” said Jabeur. “Maybe because I wanted it too much, I didn’t have it. But it’s just the beginning of great things for me and I’m really trying to stay positive, to continue and get the titles that I want.”
Staying positive should not be a problem. At a tournament that began under the shadow of player bans and points deductions, and descended further into acrimony with reports that the WTA has imposed a $1m fine on the All England Club and the LTA, Jabeur has been an unfailing source of joy and illumination. With both her racket and her words, she radiates positivity. And for a set, as she disrupted Rybakina’s rhythm with her slices and drop shots, it looked as though her guile and variety would prevail.
“I didn’t start well,” said Rybakina, who made 17 unforced errors in the first set and found the court with only 58% of her first serves. “The first set I was too nervous, and of course Ons played well. I needed time to adjust to her game.”
Having done so, however, Rybakina soon found her range. In the opening game of the second set, she clubbed a forehand winner to earn a first break point, which she converted with a rare sliced backhand of her own that drew an error. After steering away a Rybakina drop shot, Jabeur threatened to break back immediately. But two huge serves snuffed out the danger and, as her second serve began climbing above shoulder level and her groundstrokes started to fire, Rybakina took control, moving inside the baseline, approaching the net, and forcing Jabeur to play the match on her terms.
“I didn’t play my best tennis in the second and third sets,” said Jabeur. “She started being more aggressive. I think she stepped into the court much more and put a lot of pressure on me that I didn’t find a solution for.”
Broken again early in the decider, Jabeur had a final chance to get back on level terms in the sixth game of the decider, where she had Rybakina at 0-40. Once again, though, Rybakina denied her – just as she has denied all comers at a tournament that began with a ban on Russians, and ended with the Duchess of Cambridge presenting the Venus Rosewater dish to a Muscovite.