Elena Rybakina’s stay at the Cincinnati Open — and current quest to dethrone Aryna Sabalenka at the top of the PIF WTA Rankings — ended on Thursday night when she was forced to retire from her quarterfinal match against Iga Swiatek with a left ankle injury.<\/p>\n
Swiatek was leading 4-1 with Rybakina serving at 40-15 when things first appeared to go wrong. Rybakina couldn’t finish off a rally at the net, and when Swiatek put a tough passing shot at her feet, the Kazakh missed the follow-up half volley and put her hands to her knees. She struggled to push off on her first serve on the next point, which lasted just three shots, and after a mid-game medical evaluation, Rybakina elected to end the match moments later.<\/p>\n
After Sabalenka lost to Sara Bejlek in the fourth round on Wednesday, Rybakina needed to reach the final in Cincinnati to take the World No. 1 ranking. Instead, Sabalenka will retain the top spot going into the US Open next week, and Swiatek, the Toronto champion, will face Jessica Pegula in the semifinals.<\/p>\n
More to come…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elena Rybakina’s stay at the Cincinnati Open — and current quest to dethrone Aryna Sabalenka at the top…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591060,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105,4277],"class_list":["post-591059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-sports","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}