Though she has been accused of trying to apologize her way out of her peccadilloes, to spend time with Sabalenka is to experience the chasm between player and person. Off-court, she is light, relaxed, and self-deprecating, unguarded and reflective. It makes sense that once the match is over, this version of her might look with some measure of penitence at the other. “You have to accept that you’ve been wrong,” she says, then laughs. “And I’ve been wrong so many times.” But she pushes back against the idea that a fiery temper is definitionally bad. In fact, she believes in it. “When I was young, I would get emotional, and then I would get really pissed with myself for getting emotional. Now I understand that it’s okay to throw the racket. It’s okay to yell something. It’s okay to go nuts if you feel like you’re holding too much in. Sometimes you just need to let it go, to empty it so you’re ready to start over and play the match. Yeah, sometimes it looks ugly and terrible, but I need it in order to keep my head in it.”
Sabalenka’s tremendous popularity suggests that fans agree with her that the ugly and terrible can make for thrilling tennis. She trails only Gauff in earnings from brand endorsements, with sponsorships that include Nike, the watchmaker Audemars Piguet, and, as of this January, Gucci. The venerable Italian house chooses its brand ambassadors carefully; in tennis, that has meant only Sabalenka and the men’s number one, Jannik Sinner. In March, she was part of an especially interesting front row at Gucci’s Milan Fashion Week show that included Shawn Mendes, Romeo Beckham, Donatella Versace, and the boyish Formula 1 driver Kimi Antonelli. She has twice as many Instagram followers as any other active female tennis pro. Intensity, authenticity, humor, glamour—Sabalenka’s off-court success proves that these are as valuable as a great first serve.
“People know when you’re being authentic, being your true self,” says Frangulis, her fiancé. “There’s always going to be something tricky in a match, because Aryna’s going to say what she feels. And she’s going to do the same on Instagram and TikTok. That makes her special. But I’ve always told her that to stay composed, she has to try to attach herself to the facts, to what is actually happening, and not to what’s coming to her mind. And the fact is that she’s the best in the game, and she can always handle it, always jump back and get it done. It’s not about erasing those emotions. It’s about using them in her favor—making it one of her superpowers instead of her kryptonite.”
Big personalities have big admirers and big detractors, and Sabalenka is aware that she is not everyone’s favorite flavor. That’s okay. “With a lot of love and a lot of attention and a lot of success, there’s always gonna be people who judge you,” she says. “They judge your look, they judge your grunting, your nationality, even your private life, your choices. I don’t scroll a lot, but sometimes I’ll see random comments on Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and I’ll ask my manager, ‘Do people really hate me that much?’ Then I go into the stadium and I feel so much support, and I realize that on the internet, it’s so few people, but it’s so loud. Sometimes it’s a fake account, and I think, You don’t even have the balls to show your face? Or sometimes you click on the profile, and you see it’s a mother with three kids, a happy family living a very conventional, perfect life. And the stuff that she’s messaging you, it’s ‘I want you to die, I want your family to have cancer, you’re a whore.’ And I think: There’s something wrong with this planet.”
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