Elena Rybakina won’t be at WTA Finals 2022. The Kazakh certified the ‘death’ of her in the hardest way possible, after an exhausting match that was decided in the third set tie-break and in which she enjoyed several match points. This is tennis: what sometimes gives you, sometimes takes away, and Jessica Pegula acted as the executing hand to put the finishing touch to a strange second part of the year. Because Rybakina is a Grand Slam champion, specifically from the past Wimbledon 2022but it seems to have received a silent treatment, almost bordering on complete oblivion, which questions the equality and justice of many.
Rybakina will not be among the best and she will not even finish the year among the 20 tennis players with the most points of the season. Perhaps some think that the rule that the ATP has, allowing a Grand Slam champion to be in the masters tournament just by being top-20, applies to the WTA. This is not the case: it would have been useless for Elena to finish in position # 17 of the Race, since she would not even have attended the final appointment of the year. The most pertinent question, however, refers to pure mathematics. Does Rybakina deserve a place in the WTA Finals? Has she done enough merit to be among the top eight of the year?
The simplest answer is a clear yes. Despite the thousands of external circumstances that have surrounded this Wimbledon, let’s apply what would have been a normal outcome: that the Kazakh would have received her 2,000 champion points, those that she earned on the track but that the bureaucracy stole from her. Do you know where the season would have ended? What number #3 in the world. Waiting for final results in the WTA Guadalajara 2022solo Iga Swiatek and Ons Jabeur they would have added more points than her: with 3,860 units she would have been above, at least, names like Caroline Garcia, Aryna Sabalenka, Simona Halep, Madison Keys, Belinda Bencic and Paula Badosa. None of them have even reached a Major final in 2022.
These are strange and turbulent times for the WTA, but going beyond the numbers also opens up another dimension for us: the media dimension. Russian-born Rybakina competed at the London Grand Slam under the Kazakh flag. It is her nationality, the one she coined a long time ago, but it seemed enough for many media to completely ignore her tennis, her results and the magnitude of her achievement. That Elena has never monopolized the spotlights of the women’s circuit and that her triumph did not, in itself, have such a great media magnet compared to other rackets? Surely it is so. That she deserves enough recognition from someone who has won a Grand Slam and not be relegated to outdoor courts, press conferences with very few questions and a kind of emptiness within the circle of champions? Do not have the slightest doubt.
A 2023 WITHOUT BAGGAGE OR PRESSURE
Perhaps the only positive part that the Kazakh can extract from all this refers to the pressure, to the expectations. Rybakina’s baggage will be light in 2023: already in the last US Open they put few spotlights on her, which beyond being truly unfair, takes away a lot of noise and possibly adapts wonderfully to his introverted personality. Perhaps Rybakina prefers everything to be this way, but some statements in recent months have shown that she too has had enough of the constant ignoring to which it has been subjected. You don’t have to be an expert to figure out that she, perhaps, is the quietest Grand Slam champion (or silenced?) of the story. And he doesn’t deserve it.
