Elena Rybakina has reacted to her agonising defeat to Victoria Mboko in a thrilling semi-final at the 2025 Canadian Open.
The world No 12 fell 6-1, 5-7, 6-7(4) to 18-year-old Canadian wildcard Mboko in a contest lasting two hours and 45 minutes in Montreal.
In the deciding set, Rybakina served for the match twice — at 5-4 and 6-5 — and she held a match point at 40-30 in the first of those two games.
The 2022 Wimbledon champion was vying for her second title of the season after she won the clay-court WTA 500 tournament in Strasbourg in May. She has previously won two WTA 1000 titles, which came in Indian Wells and Rome in 2023.
Rybakina had defeated Hailey Baptiste, Jacqueline Cristian, Dayana Yastremska and Marta Kostyuk to reach the last four in Montreal.
After losing to Mboko, Rybakina remained positive about her run despite her difficult exit.
“Yeah, it was tough match, but overall I think successful week for me. Slowly getting better on the court, so yeah,” she assessed.
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The 26-year-old Kazakh also admitted that the heavy crowd support for home favourite Mboko was challenging to deal with.
“Yeah, that wasn’t nice, of course,” Rybakina said.
“I played in a lot of situations where the crowd was supporting the [other] player, but I would say that here it was pretty tough from very beginning.
“I already felt it from the first game we played, and especially when it’s in between the serves.
“It is what it is. This is something I was kind of expecting, and definitely it didn’t depend anyhow on my serve or in the mistakes I did or wrong choices. It was obvious that the crowd is going to cheer for their player.”
Davide Sanguinetti, who started coaching Rybakina in February 2025, set the former world No 3 an ambitious ranking target in a recent interview with SuperTennis.
“At the moment, I’m a sort of ferryman: I joined her team in February, without any work behind me,” the Italian said.
“She explained to me more or less what she had done, and I asked her for two years of collaboration because I have my own working method: in the first year I would like to maintain the status quo, maybe finish at number 6 in the rankings, and next year I would like to take her to number one in the world: she has all the potential.”
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