Few things are more satisfying to watch in sports than the unlikely comeback. Even among wins from a losing position, there are levels: A top seed recovering from their slow start (cough, Novak Djokovic) is impressive, but cannot possibly compare to the underdog getting tossed around for an hour, growing into their game, and turning the tables on the favorite. For a truly epic upset comeback, the fan must be certain of the event's outcome, only for the opposite result to occur and challenge their previous perceptions of the sport and its participants along the way. A comeback win requires superior skill and excellence in crucial moments (in unrelated news: the sky is blue), but in tennis, more so than any other sport, a requisite quality is an enduring faith that the match remains winnable until the last ball is struck.
Newly minted Wimbledon finalists Jasmine Paolini and Barbora Krejcikova are the most recent testaments to tenacity, each winning their semifinals from a set down against bigger-hitting opponents on Thursday. Both wins were striking, but Krejcikova’s especially so. She played Elena Rybakina, the 2022 Wimbledon champion and the heavy favorite to win this tournament at the time of the semifinals. Rybakina has a devastating serve and hits her groundstrokes with not just pace but a penetrating weight; she can rip forehands and backhands that her opponents either don’t bother chasing or run down only to helplessly smack them into the ground.
Rybakina won the first four games of the match and saw out the first set even after a mini-resurgence from Krejcikova, then remained a constant threat to break serve early in set two. She hit plenty of unforced errors, but that’s the beauty of Rybakina’s game—she dominates so many points that she can afford to give away a handful for free, knowing her tennis is too imposing for her opponent to build on the gifts.
Rybakina is notoriously emotionless on court. What makes most other players smash their rackets will maybe get an annoyed shrug out of her. In conjunction with her pulverizing tennis, this makes Rybakina a difficult opponent to shake out of a groove—she’ll play most points on her terms, and nothing bothers her, so what can you do? Krejcikova decided she would fill every cubic inch of the negative space from Rybakina’s temperament. Cries of “POJD!” (Czech for “come on!”) filled the air after virtually every point Krejcikova won in the first two sets, and I’m not exaggerating—check the highlights. If Rybakina was missing a lot, Krejcikova resolved to miss as little as possible to make each of her opponent’s errors sting a bit more.
Krejcikova scraped her way to hold from a break point at two-all in the second set and went on to break in the very next game. But the critical moment came when she served for the set at 5-3. She sailed to a 40-love lead—a safe lead anywhere, and especially on grass, which increases the odds of an unreturned serve. Krejcikova double faulted at 40-love, though, which seemed to wake Rybakina up, and in seconds the other two set points were gone, too. Krejcikova fought to a fourth set point, then a fifth, and double faulted on each of them. She was practically begging to get broken and surrender the advantage she’d run uphill for an hour to get. But she survived the game despite teetering on the abyss, and won the set to tie the match.
Rybakina had her chances in the third set, most notably a love-30 advantage at 1-0, but the dynamic of the match was never the same. One constant across all sports is that underdogs multiply 10 times in size when given just a trickle of confidence. Whereas in the first set Rybakina needed just one or two crosscourt exchanges to overpower Krejcikova with a sweeping backhand, now Krejcikova was matching her for pace, erasing Rybakina’s well of free points while extracting more errors. Krejcikova got the vital break in the third set with startling ease and served out the match with even less friction. Krejcikova, the Roland Garros champion in 2021, is now one match from a major title on a vastly different surface.
She’ll have to beat Jasmine Paolini to win it. Unlike Krejcikova, Paolini, the recent Roland Garros runner-up, is on a magnificent run and was expected to win her semifinal. But after getting skewered by Donna Vekic’s winners for a set, her victory seemed a remote possibility. Though Vekic doesn’t have Rybakina’s fearsome reputation as a power player, she consistently hit huge serves over 105 mph with intelligent placement, targeting the sidelines to capitalize on the shorter Paolini’s limited reach. She flew through the first set, 6-2.
Yet Paolini willingly played the entire match from behind. After the Italian won the second set, she would have been within her rights to expect a reprieve, but she was immediately under fire in the third—Vekic threatened to blow her away by breaking serve immediately and pressing for another break. Paolini kept her hopes alive by staying within two games of Vekic, endured losing a couple match points late in the set, and overturned an 8-7 deficit in the deciding tiebreak to seal victory in the longest-ever women’s semifinal at Wimbledon.
Regardless of what the cliches say, execution is always more important than tenacity. Though resilience bleeds into gameplay, the forehands and backhands supersede warrior-like spirit, probably more than fans and journalists would like to admit. How frequently does an athlete’s indomitable will break their opponent, really? Not often, and when they do it’s usually directly because of a pattern of play, not the opponent’s somehow tangible spirit. The convenient narrative is that Carlos Alcaraz is a comeback wizard because he rarely gives up; what is really going on is that his heavy forehand, sneaky drop shot, and sonic speed make him exhausting to play against, all the more so late in matches, so he has a technical advantage in fourth and fifth sets over his wasted opponents.
But Krejcikova’s win was as tied to defiance as any match I’ve seen recently—it seriously felt like her celebratory yells were the main asset she had that Rybakina didn’t for a while—and Paolini’s comeback was a close second. Both players showed how resilience can be a helping hand, even if not a magic key, to victory. You shout to remind the opponent (and yourself) constantly of your presence. You run everything down in the hopes of eking out an error or forcing the opponent to expend the extra energy of hitting one more shot. If you must give ground, you give it slowly, inviting the rival to choke at every opportunity as they inch forward. Vekic crumbled physically a little against Paolini, possibly worn down by a string of consecutive long matches, while Rybakina’s execution faltered just enough as Krejcikova’s improved to tilt the balance of their match. Defiance matters there, too; a player can sow the seeds of a win even while losing by exhausting their opponent, as Daniil Medvedev did against Jannik Sinner on Tuesday.
Such determination makes for better tennis. Those who refuse to yield extend the excitement of a match to the final moments and small rallies (which can become huge rallies) remain possible until the very last point. Fans appreciate few things more than dogged effort. The losing semifinalists themselves looked affected by their opponents’ unrelenting intensity; Rybakina was as frustrated as she has ever been, even looking bewildered at times as Krejcikova drew closer to the finish line despite only appearing the better player for a fraction of the match. And Vekic, despite suffering a near-physical breakdown, eagerly joined the battle. Paolini is the smiliest player on tour, flashing grins after brilliance from her and her opponent alike. After winning a brutal rally late in the third set with a forehand winner, Vekic trudged forward slowly, and momentarily found reason to smile too.
