FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. — With one victory Saturday night, Aryna Sabalenka transformed her whole year.

What otherwise would have been a “nearly season” for the ages, she can instead look back on as one of the most consistent campaigns in recent tennis memory. A second U.S. Open title, secured with a 6-3, 7-6(3) win over Amanda Anisimova, following runner-up finishes at the Australian and French Opens and a semifinal at Wimbledon.

By winning the U.S. Open, Sabalenka has completely upended the narrative that her year should be viewed as exposing a tendency to buckle under pressure when it matters most.

Three Grand Slam titles even before Saturday night would have rendered that idea nonsensical, but being a world No. 1 without holding one of the four majors would not have sat well with Sabalenka. And the pressure on her at the Australian Open would have been suffocating had she lost another final here. Especially if she had done so having missed a smash deep into the second set that would have given her a match point. That she was able to recover and close out the match in the tiebreak speaks to her strength of character.

“That (smash) was the moment, but then, yeah, I turned around, and I took a deep breath in, and I was like, ‘OK, it happens. It’s in the past. Let’s focus on the next one,’” Sabalenka said in a post-match news conference.

But how much was riding on this match also underlines the fact that Sabalenka is a player who seems to constantly tread a fine line between triumph and implosion. Her final news conference at the French Open saw her angrily venting about her performance and the conditions; two majors later, she sauntered into the interview room with a bottle of Moet champagne and novelty sunglasses.

Aryna made quite an entrance to her press conference 🍾 pic.twitter.com/lTjPKokRWp

— US Open Tennis (@usopen) September 7, 2025

The swings in fortune tend to be drastic with Sabalenka. Even early-round matches are often up-and-down affairs in which she can look on the brink of losing control at various points. She invariably gets through, and a bit like Carlos Alcaraz, even though her focus can waver in matches, the bigger picture is one of remarkable consistency. She has reached the semifinals or better in 11 of her last 12 Grand Slams and has made six finals in her previous eight. Sabalenka is the runaway world No. 1, and by winning Saturday, she became the first singles champion, man or woman, to successfully defend the U.S. Open since Serena Williams in 2014.

But this year offers a neat encapsulation of why she hasn’t yet completely taken over the WTA Tour. It’s an exaggeration to say Sabalenka doesn’t produce her best in major finals, but it’s not totally wide of the mark. Certainly against Coco Gauff at the French Open in June, where her performance — in her own words, “terrible” — didn’t meet the standards one would expect from a dominant world No. 1. At the Australian Open, Madison Keys played the braver tennis down the stretch, as did Anisimova in their Wimbledon semifinal.

All of which leaves the WTA Tour feeling typically unpredictable and full of parity heading into 2026. Sabalenka will be the favorite to win a third Australian Open in four years, but there are no guarantees. Four-time champion Iga Świątek must still be considered the default favorite for the French Open, while Wimbledon, with 11 different winners in 12 editions, remains anyone’s guess. The U.S. Open feels like Sabalenka’s domain, but Anisimova, a finalist at the last two slams, could be a factor at any of the four.

The way Anisimova rebounded from her 6-0, 6-0 loss to Świątek in the Wimbledon final in July to beat the same player this week was a remarkable turnaround. She said she also learned a lot from that first Grand Slam final, which she applied in her much better showing against Sabalenka on Saturday night.

Where Sabalenka has retained an edge on the field is through her desire to constantly evolve. Not just by adding more variety and touch to a game that was previously pretty one-dimensional, but in how she thinks and the people on her team. Świątek is going through a similar process with coach Wim Fissette, while world No. 3 Gauff is remodeling her serve.

Ahead of the final, her performance coach, Jason Stacy, talked about how Sabalenka is constantly adding layers. That could be the addition of the drop shot as a weapon in her arsenal, or it could be something more psychological, which was more the priority over the last few challenging months.

Aryna Sabalenka gestures toward her coaching staff during her match against Coco Gauff at the French Open. (Julian Finney / Getty Images)

After losing the French Open final — an even more frazzling affair because of her heavily criticized post-match comments about the poor quality of her play — Sabalenka took control of the situation. She talked in her on-court interview Saturday night about learning lessons from her Grand Slam final defeats this year, then later explained that in trying to forget about her Australian Open and move on, she realized she needed to face what had happened at Roland Garros head-on. While on holiday on the Greek island of Mykonos, she asked herself why she was allowing her emotions to take over in big matches. Why was she assuming she would win every final she played just by turning up?

Sabalenka’s perspective was helped by reading James R. Doty’s book “Into the Magic Shop,” about the human brain and in part explaining how and why people overthink. “Reading that book, I realized a lot of things,” Sabalenka said Saturday. “That book really helped me to stay focused and to focus on the right things on important points.”

Sabalenka called a meeting with her team to try to make sense of what had happened in Paris and explain her new mindset and willingness to address the challenges that the year had thrown up. “For us, that was a really nice thing that she started to actually initiate wanting to figure some things out, to talk about it and get things out of her head,” Stacy said in a news conference. “Because before, she would have a habit of keeping it to herself until it becomes something bigger.”

Stacy added that the player who has a tiger tattoo on her left arm “sometimes has this internal battle of how to keep that tiger under control but let it free at the same time. So there’s this constant battle that she’s revisiting.”

It was a battle Sabalenka won on Saturday. There were a couple of moments — after missing that smash two points from victory and after being broken midway through the first set — when previously the tiger might have gotten out of control. “Going into this final, I decided for myself that I’m going to control my emotions,” she said. “I’m not going to let them take control over me, and (it) doesn’t matter what happens in the match — if she breaks me back or if she plays incredible tennis.

“My mindset was just going out there, fight for every point. Doesn’t matter the situation. Just focus on myself and focus on things that I have to do to win the match. I think from what I understand today, that’s the lesson learned, and I really hope it will never happen again — that I will be more in control.”

Sabalenka also spoke about her decision to stop working with her long-term psychologist a couple of years ago because she felt she was becoming too reliant on her. She has never been afraid to shake up the team around her.

That includes this year, when, after Wimbledon, she added fellow Belarusian Max Mirnyi, the former doubles world No. 1 and top-20 singles player, to her coaching group. Lead coach Anton Dubrov was a big driver for that change. He was once told by Jannik Sinner’s coach Darren Cahill that in his view, once a coach has been with a player for three years, they almost stop listening them, because they feel like they know what the coach is going to say in any given situation.

Dubrov has been coaching Sabalenka for five years and didn’t want their partnership to become stale. “That’s why I’m always asking Aryna, ‘What can we do?’ Because it’s pretty normal to move on to find someone else.”

Sabalenka was clear she didn’t want to make that kind of change, but they agreed to ask Mirnyi to join the team. The pair have known each other for years, and after a weeklong training block together in an informal capacity, it was clear this was an additional layer that would help Sabalenka.

As a six-time men’s doubles Grand Slam champion, as well as the winner of an Olympic gold medal, he has experience delivering in big moments. And his technical knowledge of shots like the serve and volley, both of which he was outstanding at, has been valued by Sabalenka and the rest of the team. “She’s got plenty of tools,” Mirnyi said Friday. “Me entering the team is just maybe — it’s a delicate mission because if I can only add one or two extra tools in her toolbox that she can operate with, I would consider my mission complete.”

That was certainly the case Saturday, and it sets up Sabalenka for 2026. It’ll be a year next month since Sabalenka assumed the world No. 1 ranking from Świątek on a points technicality associated with mandatory tournaments, which by winning the U.S. Open she has well and truly converted into a position of merit. But different winners at all of the majors this year, for the seventh time in nine seasons, points to a far more equitable distribution of power than on the men’s side.

Still, Saturday it was clear that Sabalenka, with a champagne bottle in hand and a few demons slayed, remains the woman to beat.

(Top photo: Elsa / Getty Images)