Belarus’s Aryna Sabalenka, the #1 tennis player in the world, covers the digital issue of Vogue ahead of the French Open. We’ve talked about Aryna a few times, often in the context of her rivalry with Coco Gauff. Coco has won two major singles titles, and both times, she beat Aryna in the final (2023 US Open and 2025 French Open). Aryna is a major champion too – she’s won two Australian Opens and two US Opens. She’s lost in multiple other major finals as well, to Coco, Madison Keys and, earlier this year, Elena Rybakina. While I acknowledge that Aryna is often a sore loser who talks too much, I actually enjoy her gregarious, loud, fun personality and she deserves more credit for her consistency, passion and power. While she lost in the AO final, she did achieve some big goals this year: she got engaged, and she won the Sunshine Double (Indian Wells and Miami). You can read Aryna’s Vogue cover profile here. Some highlights:

Winning the Sunshine Double in March. It was also the month she adopted a King Charles spaniel puppy, named Ash after tennis great Arthur Ashe, and got engaged to Georgios Frangulis, a Greek Brazilian businessman and the founder of Oakberry, an acai-bowl brand with more than 800 stores in over 50 countries. Bearing two big trophies and wearing a 12-carat oval diamond ring (conceived by Frangulis and executed by her friend the Miami-based jewelry designer Isabela Grutman), Sabalenka was reveling. She told commentators from The Tennis Channel that it was the single best month of her life.

How she handles losses: “It’s a learning process. If I didn’t really care and was like, Whatever, on to the next one, I wouldn’t learn. That would be unhealthy. That’s the tough side of being an athlete: You cannot win everything. Your body will, at some point, stop you, limit you. But it’s also the beauty of sport. It’s nice, too, when somebody young and up-and-coming beats the world number one. If somebody won everything, it wouldn’t exactly be entertaining to watch.”

Growing up in Minsk: “Until I was maybe 13, we were wealthy. And then my dad struggled. So many setbacks. I watched him struggle many times in his career but always get up. My parents tried hard to keep things going, and we didn’t really talk about it. But I knew. Parents think we don’t know, but we know.”

Her earliest sponsor, with connections to Lukashenko: Belarusian businessman Alexander Shakutin… recognized her potential and provided financial backing. They no longer have a professional affiliation, and in recent years Shakutin has seen his share of controversy, identified as a person close to Belarus’s authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko and sanctioned by the European Union as a result. But Sabalenka remains grateful for his early support. “He was the one who really believed in me. There were other people who believed in me, but he was the one who helped me.”

She’s always had a fiery, hyper-emotional personality: “I was very much a Taurus. Like, if I see a goal, I need to get it, and there is no other way. This is part of my personality that can drive me crazy, but it can also drive me into that real fight mode and help me play with passion. It’s two sides of the medal.” Sabalenka began to develop a reputation for painful losses in high-stakes matches. She has won four Grand Slam finals—and lost four Grand Slam finals. “I would get super emotional all the time. I was, like, under zero control. I could lead the match, then be super crazy and let it go. I knew that I had a problem.”

She apologized to Coco Gauff quickly last year: [By the time Aryna & Coco were making TikToks together] Sabalenka had already publicly apologized to Gauff for what had occurred in that infamous press conference. “When I got to Wimbledon last year, my first press conference was packed like crazy,” Sabalenka recalls. “I was like, ‘Wow, guys, are you expecting more of the French Open?’ But then we did the TikTok video. Coco is one of those girls who understands everything. She never gets upset or offended. If you say you’re sorry, she’s like, ‘Oh, girl, it’s okay. You’re good.’ No one will understand you better than another athlete. I feel like all of us think, Okay, I should win every match. If you’re not thinking that way, then what are you doing? When you’re in the top five and you’re winning Grand Slams, it’s not okay to be okay with losing. That’s my mentality.”

It’s okay to be super-emotional: “You have to accept that you’ve been wrong…And I’ve been wrong so many times.” But she pushes back against the idea that a fiery temper is definitionally bad. In fact, she believes in it. “When I was young, I would get emotional, and then I would get really pissed with myself for getting emotional. Now I understand that it’s okay to throw the racket. It’s okay to yell something. It’s okay to go nuts if you feel like you’re holding too much in. Sometimes you just need to let it go, to empty it so you’re ready to start over and play the match. Yeah, sometimes it looks ugly and terrible, but I need it in order to keep my head in it.”

Ukrainian players don’t shake her hand because of the war: “Not shaking hands—I respect that position,” she says, referring to the decision by some players, including the Ukrainian Elina Svitolina, not to shake hands at the net after matches with Russian and Belarusian athletes. “I know it’s not personal. They’re sending a message. But it was tough, the amount of hate I was receiving from people on tour. One coach went nuts on me, saying that I’m the one who’s throwing the bombs. It’s obvious that I want peace for everyone. I don’t want this war to happen. They should sit down at the table and, with negotiations, figure their sh-t out. But I also think that sport is a platform and a place where we can come together, not fight against each other as if we’re having our own war. Get together, be together, show peace. For so long, Ukrainians and Belarusians were like brothers and sisters. We’re the same. We’re all tied close together. And now there’s a huge wall between us, and I don’t know if it’s ever going away.”

[From Vogue]

I’m both surprised and not surprised by Aryna really dumping out her purse to Vogue. She’s done magazine interviews before now, but this is probably her biggest cover and the highest-profile interview she’s done in the American market. I think that’s on purpose – she’s ignored by the American media a lot of the time, and she’s often treated with an eyeroll, oh, another Eastern European ball-basher, how charming. But she’s actually based in Miami these days and she’s clearly trying to build a larger profile for herself as a global celebrity-athlete. Which is fine with me – if she was an American or Brit, she would be much more famous and everyone would be praising her to the hilt. She came across well here – it’s well known in the tennis world that she worked with a therapist and a sports psychologist for years, and I think somewhere along the line (probably in the last year), someone gave her some media training too.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, cover courtesy of Vogue.