After the world No. 1’s last dramatic loss at a major, to Diana Shnaider at the French Open, everyone knew what would happen next. Sabalenka would cool her head and get through her media obligations. Then she would conduct the psychological autopsy, with the most trusted members of her inner circle.
And after getting within two points of a straight-sets, quarterfinal win, only to unravel and lose the last 10 games in a display of sporting self-immolation, Sabalenka was very clear about what she wanted to tell the wider world.
“Right now I just want to quit tennis,” Sabalenka said in a news conference after the 3-6, 7-5, 6-0 heartbreaker.
Except, as she and her team knew, there wasn’t any time for that. There never is, because of tennis’ relentless schedule, but when Sabalenka walked out of the Roland Garros interview room, another Grand Slam — the one that she and pretty much every player wants to win most of all — was just over three weeks away. As Wimbledon loomed, it was time for Sabalenka and her team to put her back together again, just like they had to do almost one year ago, after her collapse in the French Open final against Coco Gauff.
In these moments, Jason Stacy, Sabalenka’s mental and physical performance coach, likes to remind the group that earlier in her career, Sabalenka was going through this cycle much more often.
“Now it very rarely happens. But my point was the cycle and what happened wasn’t any different. And the best part about this situation for us is that we’ve visited this several times,” he said during an interview last month.
That’s also the worst part. This is the way it often is with Sabalenka, a series of double-edged swords. Her greatest strengths can also become her greatest weakness.
That’s where the catastrophe routine comes in.
It was a small group this time, as it often is. Stacy and Anton Dubrov, Sabalenka’s other main coach, were there. Helen Murawska, her physiotherapist, came too. Sabalenka’s fiancé, Brazilian-Greek entrepreneur Georgios Frangulis, joined the chat. Then there was Sabalenka herself.
It was a new autopsy. But the questions are always the same.
What had she been feeling in the days and hours leading up to the match? Were there any red flags anyone missed? Could they have done something different? Where and when did the match start to spin off course? How did she respond? What tools did she use? What didn’t she do? Was there something she needed that she didn’t get? Did anyone miss anything?
The discussion doesn’t go on forever. There are no definitive answers; it’s a process. Another opportunity to learn something, about tennis, and about herself.
And then they all go their separate ways, because after a Grand Slam, everyone needs a break.
This time, Sabalenka and Frangulis went to Vienna. Dubrov went to see some old friends in Germany. Stacy went home to the Pacific Northwest to see his family. Give the team WhatsApp threads a break, switch off and then come back to the grind of trying to figure out if there might be a better way, some new tools that Sabalenka might try when everything starts to go sideways. Breathing. Versions of meditation and visualization. There is no silver bullet. Only possibilities.
“You have to find a way to apply the things that you believe will help them, but in a way that makes sense to them, that connects with who they are, so that way it’s theirs,” said Stacy, who in September is releasing a book entitled “The Pressure Code,” which explores parts of Sabalenka’s travails.
“It’s not mine, it’s not Anton’s. It’s hers, and it has to be that way. She has to be the one responsible, accountable. It has to feel right for her, because this whole positive thinking — it doesn’t work if you don’t believe it. You can lie to yourself all you want, but in those pressure moments, the lies will show up.”
For a day, at least, it looked like it’s working. Sabalenka, in her first Grand Slam match since the Paris implosion, had a largely stress-free afternoon against Teodora Kostović of Serbia on Monday on Centre Court at Wimbledon, beating her 6-2, 6-3 in 65 minutes. She faces McCartney Kessler of the U.S. Wednesday in the second round.
Stacy, 52, first came to sports through martial arts, including aikido and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Years ago, he shared with Sabalenka something he learned from his first sensei, Jan Sunderlin: “Through loyalty, you gain trust. With trust comes freedom. To maintain that freedom, remain loyal.”
Loyalty doesn’t mean mindless obedience. It means an athlete staying true to their values, their craft and their discipline, instead of taking a flavor-of-the-month short cut in search of success.
Sabalenka, 28, has her own version of what that looks like.
“We don’t make things dramatic. We don’t overthink everything. If something isn’t working, we look at it and deal with it. If I’m struggling, I can say it. If I’m angry, that’s fine too. Then we move forward,” she wrote in the foreword to Stacy’s book.
“Simple, but not easy… I’m not perfect. I still lose. I still get upset. I still have days when I feel like I should have done things differently. But I’m in a better place now than I was years ago, and that didn’t happen by accident. It came from building an environment I trust. From working with people who don’t panic when things get uncomfortable.”
In a news conference ahead of Wimbledon, Sabalenka said it took a couple days to feel like she didn’t want to quit tennis. She began to feel better as soon as she left Roland Garros.
And while she didn’t panic, she did call for some reinforcements, contacting the psychologist she’d stopped working with three years ago when she felt she needed to be more accountable to herself.
“I need someone to throw all of my thoughts to, kind of like clear my head a little bit ahead of a big tournament,” Sabalenka said. “I have my team. We chat a lot. Sometimes you have things that you don’t want to throw at your team at the same time. I think it’s really important to have someone you can talk to and you can feel safe with.”
Things got very uncomfortable on a windy day in Paris just over a year ago, in similar conditions to those that undid Sabalenka against Shnaider earlier this month.
After losing to Gauff and watching her lift the Coupe Suzanne-Lenglen, Sabalenka doubled down on her misery in her on-court speech and then her news conference, ripping into her opponent and crediting the result to her own “terrible” tennis, rather than to how Gauff had induced its terribleness.
Sabalenka said Gauff only won because she had been awful. Because the wind had been miserable. She said that Iga Świątek, the four-time French Open champion whom Sabalenka had beaten under the Chatrier roof one match earlier, would have beaten Gauff.
A few days later, Sabalenka apologized on social media. Ahead of Wimbledon, she and Gauff did a TikTok dance video on the London grass. And when Sabalenka lost to Amanda Anisimova there in the semifinals, there was no such meltdown.
Later that summer, she faced Anisimova in the U.S. Open final. On the verge of an eruption in the first set, Sabalenka held herself back from smacking a ball in anger and reset. Then she won that set, and the next one, and with it the tournament, for the second time in a row.
She came to accept that her competitors would bring their best against her. They did it plenty in 2025, with Madison Keys, Mirra Andreeva, Jelena Ostapenko and Elena Rybakina inflicting defeats in finals at the Australian Open, BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Stuttgart Tennis Grand Prix and WTA Tour Finals.
This season has been another of incredible highs and confounding lows. Rybakina sent Sabalenka home from Melbourne with another Australian Open runner-up trophy. At Indian Wells, Sabalenka beat Rybakina to win the title, and then won the Miami Open, completing a rare Sunshine Double.
At the Madrid Open, she held five match points against Hailey Baptiste in the quarterfinals, but couldn’t get over the line. At the Italian Open, she lost in the third round, her earliest defeat in 15 months. Then came Shnaider in Paris, and then Jessica Pegula on the grass at the Berlin Tennis Open, where Sabalenka came from 6-4, 6-6 (3-1) down to level their semifinal, but again lost the deciding set 6-0.
For Dubrov, the losses, especially in finals, often lead him to wonder whether he has passed his sell-by date. He’s been coaching Sabalenka for five years. It’s rare these days for top players to stick with coaches for more than three. He often raises the question with her.
“It’s pretty normal to move on to find someone else,” he said during a news conference at the U.S. Open last year. “As she said, she’s feeling kind of safe with me overall.”
Dubrov did bring in Max Mirnyi, who, like Sabalenka, is a Belarusian who lives in Florida, as another voice. Mirnyi has often reminded Sabalenka that there is no such thing as a perfect match. During every great’s best performances, something didn’t go according to the plan and they had to respond and adjust in the moment.
“Like a painter painting, there are so many things that could go one way or the other that you can just adjust and enhance her game in many different ways,” Mirnyi said in the same news conference. “It’s a very delicate process.”
Sabalenka’s loss to Shnaider, with Wimbledon across the English Channel, also underscored how the moments in which her tennis unravels might impinge on her overall legacy. Her career finals record, including Grand Slams and WTA Tour events, is 21-10 on hard courts, 3-8 on clay and 0-2 on grass. Her three clay-court titles are all Madrid Opens, the event where altitude and heat can help players to win in spite of the surface rather than because of it.
Sabalenka missed Wimbledon in 2022, because the tournament banned Belarusians and Russians from competing after Russia invaded Ukraine that spring. In 2024, she picked up a shoulder injury and withdrew days before the start. In 2021, 2023 and 2025, she made the semifinals, but she also has a 1-4 record against top-10 players there.
It’s the only Grand Slam where Sabalenka is yet to make the final, but she and her team see little reason to believe she never will. Sabalenka is still in her athletic prime, though Stacy said they are always on the lookout for nagging issues with her hip and lower back, which flared up during this year’s Italian Open. The hip is a congenital condition that can cause joint stress; the back pain is a remnant of injuries from her teenage years, including disc damage and stress fractures.
“Occasionally she’s going to have these flare-ups and sometimes we can manage it well enough where she can play no problem,” he said. “Other times she’s really compensating, you can feel it, and you can see it in how she’s moving. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.”
Clay and grass can complicate that. Clay forces her to slide and use her hips to generate power from a fully extended position. On grass, the ball stays low, so she is constantly bending and reaching down, and flexing the hip. These are the physical wrinkles that every player has to manage in different forms, along with the mental ones.
Consistency can help. Stacy has been around for eight years. Dubrov has been there in some capacity – a hitting partner, an assistant coach, and the head coach, for longer than that. Murawska has been on the team since 2023. They have seen just about everything before.
“There’s nothing to reinvent right now,” Stacy said. “We always have to evolve, but we don’t have to change anything. We don’t have to freak out, we don’t have to panic. We just recognize that this is the same pattern as we’ve always seen.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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