By Chris Oddo | @TheFanChild | Tuesday March 28, 2023
Elana Rybakina continues to ride the hot hand in Miami. She reached the semifinals with a dominant win over Martina Trevisan.
Photo Source: Getty
The aces keep raining down and the wins keep coming for Elena Rybakina. The 2022 Wimbledon continues to storm the opposition in Miami, and inch ever closer to becoming the fifth woman to ever win Indian Wells and Miami back to back in the same season.
Sunshine Double, WTA
Graf (1994-1996)
Clijsters (2005)
Azarenka (2016)
Swiatek (2022)
On Tuesday the 6’0” powerhouse was hardly bothered by Italy’s Martina Trevisan, and when she was she responded in kind, winning the final eight games of the match to book a semifinal spot in Miami with a 6-3, 6-0 victory.
Rybakina cracked 10 aces, becoming the first WTA player to hit double-digit aces in four consecutive matches this year as she dispatched the No.25 seed in 70 minutes – she will face either Jessica Pegula or Anastasia Potapova in the last four.
Rybakina (20-4) joins Sabalenka on the WTA’s 20-win list, and raises her ace total for those matches to a tour-leading 201.
There isn’t much that the 23-year-old hasn’t been doing well of late. During her career-best 12-match winning streak she has routinely displayed her poise under pressure, as well as her improved physicality and movement.
She says she hasn't been moving quite as well this week as she was at Indian Wells, but Rybakina is moving well enough to win.
"I would say that of course 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," she said on Tuesday. "There is a lot of ups-and-downs, but I think overall it's not bad."
Making the transition across the country, dealing with different conditions and fatigue from Indian Wells, she has struggled at times in her first three rounds, but whenever tested she proves her mental toughness by delivering clutch tennis.
“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," Rybakina said. "Even today I didn't serve that well, the percentage of the first serve, but in these important moments like 30-All, 30-40 or something like this, I was serving ace. So I think it's just important to find these moments and to push, and for now is doing well even being not super fresh.”
The more comfortable she becomes, the more dangerous she looks.
And if the streak ends, Rybakina's confidence is so high right now, odds are she'll just get started on another one.
"hopefully I can continue like this, but for sure it's gonna come the day when I'm gonna lose," She said. "Doesn't really change much."