Aryna Sabalenka continued her excellent season with a triumph at the Madrid Open Saturday evening in the Spanish capital.
Sabalenka, the world No. 1, beat Coco Gauff 6-3, 7-6(3) to finish the tournament with the kind of exclamation point that has escaped her on occasion this season.
Sabalenka has been far and away the most consistently excellent player in the sport in 2025. She has made the final of six of the seven tournaments she has entered this year, winning three of them. The Madrid title is her second WTA 1,000 trophy — the level just below a Grand Slam — this year. She won the Miami Open in March, and kicked off the season with a win in Brisbane.
Losses in the finals of the Australian Open, Indian Wells and Stuttgart have been sore spots, but the win in Madrid will surely provide a major boost of confidence heading into the two most important clay-court tournaments of the season, the Italian Open in Rome and the French Open in Paris. Last year, Sabalenka relinquished the Madrid Open title to Iga Świątek in the best WTA Tour match of the season. Now she has it back.
For Gauff, the loss was a disappointing end to a run that wasn’t quite out-of-nowhere, since she is the world No. 3 and a threat to win any tournament she enters. But it followed months of inconsistency and struggles with both her serve and her forehand, even early on in Madrid.
Following her loss in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open in January, Gauff couldn’t get past the last 16 in a tournament until two weeks ago. She lost consecutive matches at tournaments in Doha, Qatar and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, then lost to Belinda Bencic and Magda Linnette in Indian Wells and Miami. Both were matches against players that Gauff said she should be beating.
She got to the last 16 in Stuttgart, but only had to win one match against the 124th ranked player in the world to do so. Then she fell in straight sets to Jasmine Paolini, who has struggled with her form throughout the year.
It figured to be more of the same at the start of Madrid. Dayana Yastrameska of Ukraine bageled her in the first set of their opening match, 6-0. Gauff managed to steady herself and survive that day, though it was dicey to the end, with Gauff failing to serve out the match on her first attempt.
But after that, she largely went on cruise control. She beat Mirra Andreeva, one of the best players of the year, in the quarters. She pummelled Świątek in the semifinals, handing the four-time French Open champion her worst loss on clay since 2019.
Then she ran into a Sabalenka, a buzzsaw when she is on her game who rarely falls to players who aren’t able to match her power, as Madison Keys did in the Australian Open final and as Jelena Ostapenko did last month in Stuttgart.
She and Gauff had played nine times previously, with Gauff holding a 5-4 edge in a matchup that pits perhaps the biggest hitter on the tour against its top defender. Both players, though, have worked intensively the past two years to become more than those archetypes. Sabalenka has tried to incorporate more variety into her attack, adding dropshots and net play to her firepower. Gauff has tried to become more aggressive, taking the initiative on the forehand rather than hitting it so often off her back foot and living to fight for another shot. Finding a groove on her first serve and limiting her double faults also helps plenty.
After conceding the first set meekly, Gauff looked to have made the match a contest when she broke Sabalenka in the fourth game of the second set, holding firm until 5-4 and serving to take the match into a decider. At that point, Sabalenka surged to 0-40; Gauff reeled her back in. The Belarusian would not be denied, breaking for 5-5 and forcing a tiebreak. Sabalenka led 3-0; Gauff reeled her back in. But the Belarusian would not be denied, winning four straight points from 3-3 in the tiebreak to take the title.
Unlike many Americans, especially the men, Gauff is extremely comfortable on clay, having spent significant time at Patrick Mouratoglou’s academy in the south of France during her childhood. She made the final of the French Open in 2022 and the semifinal last year. If Świątek isn’t on form — but considering that she reached the semifinals in Madrid playing well below her peak, that could be a tall ask — Gauff could find an opening to go all the way, depending on which version of her shows up. Often, not even she knows until she takes the court.
In Madrid, it was mostly a very good version, but Sabalenka proved too tall an order.
For the Belarusian, the season has reached the point when anything less than a title in any tournament, on any surface, is a disappointment. Two years ago she came within a point of the French Open final. A three-time Grand Slam winner, she will be looking to get two steps further there this year, and now has every reason to believe she can.
(Photo: Oscar del Pozo / AFP via Getty Images)