US tennis player Jessica Pegula lost the US Open women’s singles final to Belarusian Aryana Sabalenka on Saturday. Sabalenka won in two sets, both times with a score of 7:5.
Pegula fought back from a deficit, as she had done all tournament. Sabalenka won the first set and took a 3-0 lead in the second, but Pegula won the next four sets to finish the match.
Sabalenka had won 11 consecutive matches and 22 of her last 23 sets before the match. The 26-year-old from Belarus claimed her third Grand Slam title after winning the last two Australian Opens.
Pegula had won 15 of her last 16 matches, all on hard courts like those at Flushing Meadows. Her only loss in that stretch came in the final of the Cincinnati Open against Sabalenka last month. After a surprising run to the final, Pegula lost again to Sabalenka on that surface.
Pegula, a 30-year-old New Yorker seeded No. 6 and playing in the first Grand Slam final of her career, was 0-6 in major quarterfinals until she knocked out No. 1 Iga Swiatek in that round on Wednesday.
The two players had very different backgrounds and experiences in tennis.
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Aryna Sabalenka after a failure against Jessica Pegula (USA) in the women’s singles final on day thirteen of the 2024 US Open tennis tournament at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. (Robert Deutsch-Images)
Pegula is a member of the royal family of upstate New York. Her parents, Terry and Kim Pegula, own the NFL’s Buffalo Bills and the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres. The family’s net worth is over $7.5 billion.
In September 2021, Jessica Pegula appeared on the podcast “Bills Pod Squad” with her mother, where she attributed her athletic success in part to her parents.
“Dad and I are like oil and water on the tennis court – we don’t mix well,” she said, laughing. “But he definitely always pushed me to be better. Work hard, always work hard, you can always do more than someone else, all that stuff. He’s very old-fashioned.”
She added that her mother has been helping her stay fit behind the scenes.
“Off the pitch, you were more concerned with getting healthy. In terms of nutrition, recovery, training and things like that.”
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Buffalo Bills owners Kim and Terry Pegula honor the family of Buffalo Bills offensive lineman Bob Kalsu, who was killed in the Vietnam War, before the game on November 27, 2016 at New Era Field in Orchard Park, New York. (Brett Carlsen/Getty Images)
Sabalenka was born in the capital of Minsk, Belarus. Her father, Sergey Sabalenka, was an ice hockey player in Belarus and unintentionally introduced her to tennis.
“One day my dad was driving me somewhere and on the way he saw tennis courts. So he took me to the courts. I really liked it and enjoyed it and that’s how it was. That’s how it started,” she said in an interview with TennisMajors.com in August.
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Jessica Pegula defeats Aryna Sabalenka in the women’s singles final on day thirteen of the 2024 US Open tennis tournament at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. Mandatory photo credit: (Robert Deutsch-Images)
Her father died in 2019 at the age of 43 and was unable to see her win her first Grand Slam titles at the Australian Open in 2023 and 2024. Nevertheless, the titles helped her get closer to her father’s dream.
“I lost my father four years ago,” she told reporters afterwards. “We had a dream: that I would win a few Grand Slams before my 25th birthday,” she said after her victory in the final of this year’s Australian Open against Zheng Qinwen.
Sabalenka won her first Grand Slam before the age of 25 at the 2023 Australian Open and secured her second before her 26th birthday this year, as her birthday is in May.
Sabalenka also lost her boyfriend this year after Konstantin Koltsov, a Belarusian ice hockey player who played for the Pittsburgh Penguins in the NHL, committed suicide in March at the age of 42.
Sabalenka now has her third Grand Slam title and will look to add a third at the Australian Open in January.
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