Born in Minsk, Belarus, Sabalenka first picked up a tennis racket when she was six. Her father, Sergey, a former ice hockey player, was looking for something—anything—to keep his active daughter busy. “I wasn’t a sitting-in-one-spot kid,” she says. They passed a tennis court and decided to give it a try. The sport seemed to be a perfect fit for Sabalenka—intense, competitive, and fun. But she admits that the real reason she liked playing tennis was because she sometimes got to skip school. “Honestly, I remember I was waiting for my father to pick me up. I was the first one to leave the school and I was so happy,” she says.
Sabalenka was close to her dad, and he was her biggest influence. She describes him as one of those guys who’s just someone you wanted to be around. “He was so fun. I remember watching him thinking, Oh my God, I want to be like him when I grow up,” she says. “I believe my personality comes from him.”
He, in turn, believed that she would be one of tennis’s greats, and together they dreamed that Sabalenka would win a couple of Grand Slam titles before she turned 25. It became the goal they were fighting for. At first, she played mostly in Belarus, but as she made her way through the developmental circuit and into the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) Tour, things started trending in that direction. She had a breakthrough season in 2018 when she won two titles, was named WTA Newcomer of the Year, and ended the year ranked number 11 in the world—all by the age of 20.
But in 2019, her father passed away suddenly from meningitis at age 43, just as Sabalenka, then 21, cracked the top 10. Suddenly the specter of winning a Grand Slam loomed even larger in her mind. She wanted to keep her promise to her dad. To keep fighting. To honor his memory by putting the family name in the history books.
But, she says, she ended up thinking about winning a Grand Slam title too much.