Once a Wimbledon Cinderella, Elena Rybakina is now the commanding favorite to win again

So far in the Iga Swiatek era, Wimbledon has become the Slam of surprises. The WTA’s No. 1 player is dominant on clay, very good on hard courts, and…still a work in progress on grass. That’s good news for the Cinderellas of the WTA. Two years ago, 17th-ranked Elena Rybakina took advantage of the opening at the top and won her first major title. Last year, unseeded Marketa Vondrousova did the same.

The Cinderellas are out in force again in 2024. Few, if anyone, expected Lulu Sun, Emma Navarro, Donna Vekic, or Barbora Krejcikova to make the quarterfinals. Even Jasmine Paolini, runner-up at Roland Garros last month, had never won a match at Wimbledon before this year—now she’s in the semis.

Rybakina is back at the business end of the Championships, too. But this time she returns as a favorite rather than an upset artist. She’s seeded fourth, but even that seems a little low considering her skill on grass, and the season she’s had in 2024. She has made title runs in Brisbane, Abu Dhabi, and Stuttgart, and reached finals in Miami and Doha. All that’s missing is a big title, and none makes more sense for her to win than Wimbledon.

Of course, recent history here says that anyone can be toppled on any given day. Can Rybakina keep her head, as the Kipling poem goes, when all about her are losing theirs?

If Rybakina can’t, I’m not sure anyone can. That’s the feeling I had after watching her exceptionally straightforward 6-3, 6-2, 61-minute win over Elina Svitolina in the quarterfinals on Wednesday. Rybakina hit 28 winners to eight for Svitolina; won 85 percent of points on her first serve; and faced just two break points. She used her hammer-like serve-plus-one to send Svitolina scrambling, often futilely, from one sideline to the other. Rybakina even left room for improvement—she made just 51 percent of her first serves.

“I played really well,” Rybakina said in her usual soft-spoken way. “Today maybe the serve percentage was not as high as the previous matches. On the baseline I was playing pretty well and felt the ball also good.”

For Svitolina, it was over before she could get her teeth, or any emotion, into the match. Last year and this year, she used the plight of her war-torn native Ukraine as inspiration for rousing performances at Wimbledon. But Rybakina, with her quiet imperiousness, never let Svitolina build any crowd fervor in Centre Court.

“It was a difficult day in the office today,” Svitolina said. “Today’s match went really, really quick….I had maybe one or two chances maybe to get back into the match, but they were just, yeah, so few of them, and I didn’t take them.”

Rybakina pronounced herself “pretty happy with the performance,” which is about rah-rah as the Russian-born Kazakh gets. She says she’s better at reading her opponents’ serves these days, and she likes that she hasn’t had to rely on one shot so far.

“Definitely I’m feeling pretty well on the court, especially last three matches,” she said. “I think I showed really good tennis. Sometimes serve can be off, but then the ground strokes are really well. I’m playing pretty confident.”

Rybakina remains the favorite for the title, but she may not feel like it as she ponders her semifinal opponent. She’s 0-2 against the streaky Krejcikova.

“As we all know, sometimes you wake up and something can happen,” says Rybakina, who has withdrawn from multiple tournaments this year due to illness or injury. “Hopefully nothing is going to happen tomorrow.”

As the poem says, if she can keep her head, this former Cinderella should be the one raising the trophy on Saturday.