Everything Elena Rybakina achieved by winning her first Grand Slam title at Wimbledon

“Maybe one day, in a few days, I’ll sit down and realize what I did,” Elena Rybakina said after winning her first Grand Slam title at Wimbledon, a run not many people saw coming, and a run full of firsts and breakthroughs for the 23-year-old Kazakh.

Here are just a dozen of the things she achieved at the All England Club this year:

She didn’t just win the biggest title of her career, she won by far the biggest title of her career. Rybakina’s only two previous tour-level titles before this came at a pair of WTA 250s—in Bucharest, Romania in 2019, then in Hobart, Australia in 2020.

She’s the first woman since 2006 to come back from a set down to win the Wimbledon final. With her 3-6, 6-2, 6-2 championship victory over Tunisia's Ons Jabeur, Rybakina became the first woman to achieve the feat since Amelie Mauresmo, who rallied to beat Justine Henin in the 2006 final, 2-6, 6-3, 6-4. The winner of the first set had won the last 14 Wimbledon women’s finals in a row.

She’s the first player representing Kazakhstan, male or female, to win a Grand Slam title. She was actually the first to even reach a Grand Slam semifinal—before Rybakina’s run to the Wimbledon title, Kazakhs were a combined 0-7 in major quarterfinals, with Yaroslava Shvedova going 0-3, Yulia Putintseva going 0-3 and Rybakina herself going 0-1 (falling in the 2021 Roland Garros quarterfinals).

She got the biggest win of her career in the final. Before her win over No. 2-ranked Jabeur, her best win by ranking came against then-No. 3 Karolina Pliskova in Dubai in 2020—and her only previous Top 10 win at a Grand Slam came against then-No. 8 Serena Williams in the fourth round of Roland Garros in 2021.

At 23 years old, she’s the youngest woman to win Wimbledon since 2011. Petra Kvitova won it that year as a 21-year-old—and then again as a 24-year-old in 2014.

At No. 23, she’s the second-lowest-ranked woman to win Wimbledon since WTA rankings began in 1975. The lowest was Venus Williams at No. 31 in 2007.

With 53, she’s one of only seven women who’ve hit 50 or more aces in a single year at Wimbledon in the last 30 years. Since IBM started tracking that in 1992, the only other women to do it are Serena Williams (who did it six times, her highest total being 102 in 2012), Pliskova (60 in 2021), Madison Keys (59 in 2015), Alexandra Stevenson (57 in 1999), Ashleigh Barty (53 in 2021) and Aryna Sabalenka (52 in 2021).

With 221, she’s now the WTA’s ace leader for 2022. The Kazakh, who was the WTA’s ace leader in 2020, too, is 35 clear of second place (Caroline Garcia with 186).

She’s the eighth woman who’s 6’ or taller to win a Grand Slam title in the Open Era. And all of the other seven have won their majors in the last 25 years—Lindsay Davenport (6’ 2 1/2”), Maria Sharapova (6’ 2”), Venus Williams (6’ 1”), Ana Ivanovic (6’), Victoria Azarenka (6’), Kvitova (6’) and Garbine Muguruza (6’).

Her three career WTA titles have now come on three different surfaces. She won in Bucharest on clay in 2019, Hobart on hard in 2020, and now Wimbledon on grass.

Her earnings at Wimbledon were 73% of what she had earned in her entire career before that. Rybakina went into Wimbledon with $3,533,236 in career prize money and pocketed $2,580,275 for lifting the Venus Rosewater Dish.

She’s the fifth No. 17 seed to win a major in the Open Era. The first four: Richard Krajicek (1996 Wimbledon), Pete Sampras (2002 US Open), Francesca Schiavone (2010 Roland Garros) and Roger Federer (2017 Australian Open).