{"id":283440,"date":"2025-11-10T15:22:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T15:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/283440\/"},"modified":"2025-11-10T15:22:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T15:22:07","slug":"wta-finals-why-did-elena-rybakina-refuse-photo-with-wta-ceo-portia-archer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/283440\/","title":{"rendered":"WTA Finals: Why did Elena Rybakina refuse photo with WTA CEO Portia Archer?"},"content":{"rendered":"

After claiming the biggest payday in women’s tennis history, Elena Rybakina refused to pose for a photo with WTA Tour chief executive Portia Archer.<\/p>\n

Rybakina, the 2022 Wimbledon champion, beat world number one Aryna Sabalenka in straight sets at the WTA Finals<\/a> on Saturday.<\/p>\n

But the Kazakh 26-year-old, who climbed to fifth in the world following the victory – which secured \u00a33.98m in prize money – stood separate from Sabalenka and Archer during the post-match celebrations, despite being asked to join them.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

Rybakina declined to say what her motive was, although the incident comes at the end of a season where the WTA issued a ban to her coach Stefano Vukov.<\/p>\n

Vukov was suspended earlier this year<\/a> after being found to have breached the WTA’s code of conduct, following an independent investigation into his behaviour towards the player.<\/p>\n

At the Australian Open in January, Rybakina criticised the WTA, saying she did not “agree with a lot of things” the governing body was doing in regards to her working relationship with Vukov.<\/p>\n

Rybakina has maintained that she was never mistreated by the 38-year-old Croat.<\/p>\n

Vukov denied any wrongdoing and, having had his ban lifted in August, was present as Rybakina triumphed at the tour’s season-ending tournament.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After claiming the biggest payday in women’s tennis history, Elena Rybakina refused to pose for a photo with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283441,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-283440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}