Elena Rybakina must have figured she had the match won. She’d just battered 18-year-old Victoria Mboko in a 25-shot rally late in their Montreal semifinal, sending her sprinting from corner to corner until Mboko’s desperate lob drifted long. Mboko hunched over in exhaustion afterwards, her racket pressed hard into the ground as a crutch. Losing a miserable point like this, reminiscent of the godforsaken PACER test, typically comes with a hangover. The fatigued player often pulls the cord early in the rally in a desperate bid to get their breath back and misses by a mile, or produces a meatball drop shot. The score here was tied—4-all in the do-or-die third-set tiebreak—but Rybakina had all the momentum and a seemingly significant fitness advantage.
So I thought. At 4-all, Mboko clobbered four forehands, but coherently rather than desperately. The last one tagged the sideline for a winner. Mboko grabbed the next two points as well to win the match, leaving my tennis logic in tatters. Rybakina’s epic rally just a minute earlier had somehow worked against her, proving the last point she would win rather than the boon I’d expected. That wasn’t Mboko’s only miracle act of the match—she’d saved a match point half an hour earlier. This proved too much for my Tennis Channel stream, which promptly buckled under the tension and crashed. Mboko broke serve to prolong the match twice, outlasting both Rybakina and TC’s notorious technical difficulties.
