Can Elena Rybakina go from Centre Court Cinderella to consistent title threat? 

TC DESK: Rybakina stops by for a champion's chat

It has been a fortnight since the end of the Wimbledon fortnight. Is there an image from the tournament that sticks with you, or that comes to mind first when you think back on it?

I wouldn’t have predicted it at the time, but for me that image is a photo of women’s winner Elena Rybakina at the Champion’s Dinner, showing off the white sneakers she was wearing under her long white dress. She grins as she flashes a peace sign with her right hand, while kicking her left leg up behind her. With her hair down and without her customary visor in place, I’m not sure I would have recognized the 23-year-old if there hadn’t been a caption to help me.

I like that pic because of its freshness; Cinderella was wearing sneakers to the ball. This was a new and surprising face, in a place no one expected her to be, reveling in a moment she may never have believed she would experience. Rybakina is famous for her stoical, stone-faced victory celebrations; now, finally, we got to see a more relaxed and spontaneous side of her. In recent years, the women’s champions at Wimbledon—Garbiñe Muguruza, Angelique Kerber, Simona Halep, Ash Barty—have been players who had won other majors, before ascending to the sport’s summit on Centre Court. Rybakina, who was seeded 17th and had never been to a Slam semifinal before, leaped straight to the top of totem pole.

By now, this type of run shouldn’t come as a surprise to women’s tennis fans. Since 2020, Sofia Kenin, Barbora Krejcikova, and Emma Raducanu have all come from nearly nowhere to win majors. So far in 2022, though, that unpredictability has been balanced by top-tier domination. Barty won the Australian Open as the No. 1 seed, and after she retired, Iga Swiatek took the baton and sprinted ahead with it, all the way to a 37-match win streak, a Roland Garros title, and the top ranking.

Swiatek finally fell to earth when she switched to grass; she’s not an all-surface champion like Serena Williams quite yet. But starting in a couple of weeks, she’ll be back on U.S. hard courts, a place where she won Masters 1000 titles in Indian Wells and Miami this spring. She’ll be joined in August by Serena and another sometimes-dominant champion, Naomi Osaka. Will any of the three of them be able to strike a blow for dominance? Or will we see another Cinderella find that the glass slipper fits in New York?

And which would be better for tennis? As much as I enjoyed Rybakina’s title run at Wimbledon, it didn’t draw many new eyeballs to the tournament or create a lot of media buzz. If her final-round opponent, Ons Jabeur, had become the first Arab woman to win Wimbledon, it would have made more headlines. Sports pundits in the U.S., aside from working overtime to pronounce Rybakina’s name correctly, gave her win a collective shrug.

So, yes, stars matter. While the word implies a pampered prima donna, a star is, first and foremost, a player who has earned the loyalty and love of fans. Sports needs stars because they need athletes who people care about and are emotionally invested in. Serena and Osaka have earned that loyalty, Swiatek seems to be on her way, and Jabeur has the personality, the game style, and the potentially massive global fanbase to do the same.

How about Rybakina? Her fellow Cinderellas—Kenin, Krejcikova, and Raducanu—haven’t repeated their Slam-title runs, and it doesn’t look any of them will any time soon. But with her imposing height and first-strike style, Rybakina might be better-positioned to make herself a regular threat at majors.

Count me as someone who hopes she does. Rybakina already has a signature move—the non-celebratory celebration—and her all-business, anti-star quality that may prove popular with traditionalist tennis fans who have never embraced the theatricality of the modern-day athlete. During the trophy ceremony on Centre Court, she won a lot of new fans by revealing a previously unsuspected, and unassuming, chattiness.

I like Cinderella runs. But I also like it when Cinderella sticks around for a few more balls. Here’s hoping we get to see Rybakina celebrating in her dress and sneakers, and flashing more smiles and peace signs, again soon.