Nomadic tennis player – Elena Rybakina
View(s):Where you pitch your tent matters, that soil becomes your nation. Now we have sports personalities with Nomadic lifestyle, their tent not pitched in the land of their birth. They are the 21st century people of sport. They travel with alien passport to play around the world, not even speak the languages of the passport country, second millennium man.
Elena Rybakina is 26 and Muscovite Russian by birth, became a tennis player in Spartak Club of Moscow, turned professional in 2016, now living in Dubai, trains in Slovakia, Florida and France is a citizen of Kazakhstan. Her choice of training locations is to have the best congregation of players, weather, connecting flights and above all facilities. Professional tennis players travel at least five times round the globe every year. Rybakina’s prize money to date is around 24 million dollars. So must be her expenditure, she is not an association wound up player, her wins and expenditures come out of her own pocket.
Winning WTA 2025 final
As a dark horse she was in Riyadh, Elina Rybakina surprised the tennis world winning yearend final of the WTA 2025. Right through the year, she was in and out of the latter half of WTA Top 10, not a prospect for winning yearend title. She has all of the need to be a winning athlete. No one will doubt that along with acumen of a high performance athlete, in the likes of tennis divas Maria Sharapova, Serena Williams, Justin Henning and Steffi Graf.
Rybakina, positioning and playing on and around base line inside the court with calculated volley moves, is the future of tennis, for women and men. Her height of six feet (184cms) and has evolved a lot in the past two years. Her game now gives time squeeze to opponents, not by hitting hard but by taking shots early as possible.
Rybakina beat Aryna Sabalenka in the Riyadh final and in the Wimbledon final on grass. It made Wimbledon title to be most elusive for Sabalenka to date.
Seasoned to take ups and down
Rybakina is single and her family is in Moscow, she is often there. From 2016 onwards her has been in the WTA circuit, she won and lost, never walked away with dejection of a bad performance. She even had some issues in personal front, great of her.
New sporting nations
What is most interesting to all of us is the path she followed. Unlike Russian Maria Sharapova, Rybakina did not come through an American academy route but via third nation Kazakhstan. It is a rich nation, a small population and unlimited resources economically. A sporting nation with many ardours regional disciplines.
Central Asia is fostering the sport in their countries. So far very successful. In recent times, Kazakhstan has given many sports citizenship in popular disciplines. Dubai has become the mega sports city. They themselves have no big names
In cricket, football, baseball or tennis. They have shown sport economy is not about creating high profile sportsmen but making arenas and make people come there. So far, they have reaped big portions, many countries are missing out including developed countries.
The Rybakina game
I believe her tennis will be the model of the future. To my memory, Canadians started this model with a string of players. One will recall Mary Pierce. The French-Canadian was the name that gave fame to Canadian tennis. Followed by Carling Bassette, Eugenie Bouchard and Aleksandro Wozniak. Bianca Andreescu gave the shot in the arm to Canadians winning the US Open, followed by Leylah Fernandez and Emma Raducanu.
Soon the 2026 season will dawn on us, for the professionals first event of 2026 will begin in the last week of this year. So crowded are the events now.
Loss of ground
At participatory level, tennis is bound to loose grounds. The skill level acquiring time and tactical maturity are the culprits here. It is no more a participatory sport but high-end skill sport like golf, target shooting, show jumping, tour cycling and fencing. These will have high-end exhibition value, meaning spectatorship for such events will not be cheap. Popular participatory sports must have easy skill acquiring possibility. Individual games have an advantage over team sport in recreational and in participation. Team sport demands selection into a team to participate. Good few sports I know keep losing players resulting in drop in participatory interest.
Survival of tennis sustained by the exhibition of the game in big events and in the media. If one notice tennis, not even the popular news stream carry it. Apparently, they have to buy the news and is expensive; exactly I do not know this to vouch for accuracy.
It is Australian summer and this is where WTA will begin its New Year season in Brisbane. Big guns will have to sustain and few old names are going to fade away. Good players used to bow out, not any more. They fall into a vacuum when they lose their sponsorship status. Save as you earn applies here too.
–George Paldano, European and Asian competition player; player development German Federation, national coach Brunei and Sri Lanka; Davis Cup, Federation Cup, ATP and WTA tour coach; WhatsApp +94775448880–