It has been nearly two years since Elena Rybakina finally reached the top of women’s tennis. Despite winning Wimbledon in 2022, the Russian-born Kazakh had to keep fighting her way up because, due to the tournament’s ban on Russian and Belarusian players, no ATP or WTA ranking points were awarded.
Instead of immediately joining the sport’s elite, Rybakina spent the following months digging and grinding, while the tennis world seemed oddly indifferent to her Grand Slam success. Many treated her as a fluke champion, and the lack of respect for her status was clear when, at the next major—the US Open—she was scheduled to play her first-round match on a secondary court.
Typically, reigning Grand Slam winners are given top billing, but in her case, the organizers made an exception.Things started changing in early 2023. Rybakina reached the Australian Open final, where she lost a tight match to Aryna Sabalenka, only to defeat her a month later in the Indian Wells final, claiming her first WTA 1000 title.
Yet even then, the conversation wasn’t about her tennis. Instead, the media fixated on her allegedly toxic relationship with Croatian coach Stefano Vukov, whom she had been working with since 2019. Some in the tennis world criticized his courtside behavior, calling it inappropriate and overly negative, and the prevailing narrative became that she needed to separate from him.
Rybakina, however, stood by him, dismissing the controversy as media nonsense—just another case of people forming opinions about something they barely understood. Over time, the noise died down, though sporadic complaints about Vukov resurfaced. But the story took a sharp turn when, behind the scenes, WTA officials had already launched a formal investigation.
On January 31, five days after the Australian Open, WTA CEO Portia Archer informed Rybakina and Vukov of the results of that investigation. The conclusion? Vukov had severely violated the WTA’s code of conduct and was banned from coaching for a year. In addition, he was required to attend courses where, at 38 years old, he was apparently supposed to learn how to behave on a tennis court.
