Victoria Azarenka taps into a parent’s "patience" after power outage disrupts Miami quarterfinal

MIAMI, Fla.— From a mid-match “bee invasion” in Indian Wells to a protester gluing his feet to the stadium at last year’s US Open, tennis players are no strangers to weird or unexpected interruptions to their matches.

On Tuesday afternoon at the Miami Open, Victoria Azarenka said she had to tap into the patience one can only learn from being a parent in order to deal with a bizarre delay during her own quarterfinal. Just three games into her clash with Yulia Putintseva, a power outage on Stadium court caused play to be halted for nearly an hour.

“It's definitely a frustration, and dealing with that… I'm not sure it's my years of experience (on tour) rather than being a parent that helped me with that,” she joked afterward. “Learning patience is my biggest challenge, for sure, (from) being a parent rather than being on the tennis court.”

WATCH: Hawkeye power outage delays Miami quarterfinal between Victoria Azarenka and Yulia Putintseva

With Putintseva on serve and leading 2-1, 30-0, the lights and advertising boards lining the Stadium court suddenly went dark as the power went out. More importantly Hawkeye Live, tennis’ automated line calling system went down too, and because there were no linespeople at the Miami Open there was no way to continue.

“In that moment where you're playing a match, you're like, Okay, you need to stop. How long you need to stop for? I have no idea. It's (definitely) not an easy thing to handle,” Azarenka said, adding that it was her first time experiencing an outage in the middle of a match.

“It's quite challenging… Do you wait, do you warm up, do you sit on the court? No one knows what's happening. I think that was probably the most confusing part…

“It was just a very uncertain situation, and I think in the situation where you are kind of already at high nerves during the match, it probably adds to it. The frustration feeds that.”

After the power was restored 52 minutes later, Azarenka was able to regroup as she took the opening set in a tiebreak, but found herself with a battle on her hands as Putintseva charged through the second set 6-1. The Belarusian broke serve twice in the final set to seal the victory after exactly three hours, 7-6 (4), 1-6, 6-3.

The victory sent Azarnenka back into the semifinals in Miami for the fifth time, and into her first at the WTA 1000 level since Indian Wells in 2021.

She awaits the winner of No. 4 seed Elena Rybakina and No. 8 seed Maria Sakkari.