MADRID \u2014 American Hailey Baptiste earned the biggest win of her career by saving six match points and beating world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka at the Madrid Open on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The 32nd-ranked Baptiste rallied to a 2-6, 6-2, 7-6 (6) victory \u2014 her first over a top 5 opponent. She will play in a WTA 1000 semifinal for the first time.<\/p>\n
The result ended a 15-match winning streak for Sabalenka, who was the defending champion in Madrid.<\/p>\n
The 24-year-old Baptiste is the first player to beat Sabalenka from match points down since Iga Swiatek did it in the 2024 final in Madrid.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a tough match. She played great,\u201d Sabalenka said. \u201cI played great. I think I had some opportunities in the third set. I felt like I was maybe a little bit rushing the point over there. But it\u2019s OK, sometimes I guess you have to learn, take the bad stuff from this week and move on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baptiste will face No. 8 Mirra Andreeva, who advanced to her first Madrid semifinal with a straight-set win over Leylah Fernandez.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MADRID \u2014 American Hailey Baptiste earned the biggest win of her career by saving six match points and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":635922,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-635921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/635922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}