Aryna Sabalenka "got into a very deep, dark hole” in Paris, and Diana Shnaider took advantage

In the TNT booth, Lindsay Davenport spoke for many of us when she asked her colleague Mary Joe Fernandez a simple question:

“How is this happening?”

It was impossible to answer then, and still hard to answer now.

No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka led No. 23 Diana Shnaider 6-3, 4-1, 30-0. She was on a nine-point winning streak. She had won the last of of those points by following her serve in and punching away a confident forehand volley. Coming from her, a baseliner, it was a play that indicated she might already be thinking about her semifinal on Friday, and trying to hone her underused skills for that match.

Then something inexplicable happened.

Sabalenka put a forehand into the net. No problem, right? She was still up two breaks and 30-15. But she didn’t act like it. Instead of shaking it off and moving on, Sabalenka bent over in frustration, the way you would expect someone who was losing badly to do. The same thing happened on the next point: After Shnaider hit a forehand winner, Sabalenka waved her hand back toward her player box in disgust.

“She’s showing a little bit of frustration, I’m not sure why,” Fernandez said.

Strange reactions turned to strange shot selection. At 30-30, Sabalenka tried a forehand drop shot from a difficult angle, into the wind, and watched it float well wide of the sideline. At break point, she went for a big second serve and hit it over the service line. Shnaider, without doing much of anything, was back in the match.

We’ve seen Sabalenka let her emotions get the better of her when she’s fallen behind in big matches on many occasions. This time, she succumbed to them when she was ahead. It was windy, the way it was when she melted down in last year’s final. Today, after a few early hiccups, she seemed to have learned her lesson and accepted the conditions. But it only took a couple of misses to make her lose her composure all over again.

Sabalenka never got it back. From 4-1 up in the second set, she lost 12 of the next 13 games, and the match 3-6, 7-5, 6-0.

“No thoughts, no emotions, just want to quit tennis right now,” Sabalenka said to start her post-match press conference.

Once that opening statement was done, she said she was bothered that officials didn’t close the roof due to the wind. But she also admitted that she never asked them to, and that she had played well in the conditions for nearly two sets.

“How can I complain if almost for the whole match everything was working OK for me, but then it just slipped away?” she asked. “I feel like it was getting crazy maybe just because mentally I wasn’t really OK.”

Sabalenka sounded like she had a case of PTSD over the 2025 final. She mentioned that the tournament hadn’t closed the roof that day, either, and in both cases it made for unwatchable tennis.

“I don’t know why would they keep it open?” she wondered. “Even though I was winning, it was very dirty tennis. I don’t know how people could actually just sit there and watch me play.”

After exhausting that subject, Sabalenka turned to face her own issues. She admitted that the pressure to try to win her first title here and at Wimbledon affects her.

“I really feel great on clay, I feel great on grass,” she said. “I think just, maybe I’m focusing too much that I never won a Slam on each, and maybe it’s kind of like make me overthink stuff, make me overemotional at some moment.”

Finally, she pinpointed what happened in this defeat.

“I just think that there’s something in specific moment during the match that happens that, like I lose control over the match.”

“Mentally, I got into a very deep, dark hole.”

Today that “specific moment,” as we saw, came when she was well ahead. Despite the scoreline, though, the wind may have robbed Sabalenka of her usual self-confidence, and the setting in Chatrier may have brought back bad memories of 2025. She was primed to lose control of her emotions, whatever the score was. It only took one innocuous mistake to set the process in motion.

By the end of her presser, Sabalenka seemed to have gone through the various stages of grief, and come out with her philosophy and her sense of humor intact.

She struck a note from Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, I guess.”

Then, asked how she would recover, she said:

“You know those rooms where you just go in and you smash everything? Probably I will spend a whole day tomorrow over there destroying stuff.”

“Maybe it will help,” she said with a smile. “Maybe not.”