Victoria Azarenka of Belarus celebrates winning her quarterfinal match against Jessica Pegula at the Australian Open on January 24, 2023 in Melbourne. Photo Credit: Reuters
Victoria Azarenka displayed the same confident brand of hard-hitting baseline tennis that propelled her to two Australian Open titles and the No. 1 ranking a decade ago, defeating Jessica Pegula 6-4, 6-1 on the night of January 24, 2023 Returned. Semi-final at Melbourne Park.
Azarenka won the 2012 and 2013 championships in Australia, but has not returned to the last four since then.
Now 33 and a mother – she walked into Rod Laver Arena wearing the jersey of her 7-year-old son’s favorite soccer team, Paris Saint-Germain – Azarenka fired big shot after big shot, opening up a 3-0 lead in 12 minutes , and would in fact never let No. 3 seed Pegula, a good friend, into the match.
Even when Pegula grabbed a game, she needed to work so hard for it, erasing six break points before finally serving to get on the board. It was a far cry from the kind of success Pegula had enjoyed earlier in the tournament: She entered Tuesday having lost zero sets and 18 games in her last four matches.
Azarenka’s semifinal opponent will be No. 22 seeded Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina, who defeated 2017 French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko 6-2, 6-4 on Tuesday afternoon.
A three-time runner-up at the US Open, most recently in 2020, Azarenka has always played most effectively on hard courts, and it showed again this evening. She repeatedly got the better of him with long exchanges of forehands and backhands; Pegula committed eight of the first 10 unforced errors of the match.
After a few misses, Pegula would sigh, roll her eyes, shrug her shoulders. She often looked to her coach, Davis Witt, for something to say, including “It’s so… slow!”
The 28-year-old Pegula from New York was playing in the quarterfinals in Melbourne for the third year in a row, but went 0-5 for her career at that stage in Grand Slam tournaments.
Her exit left No. 5 Aryna Sabalenka as the lone top-20 woman left in the bracket. Sabalenka will face unseeded Donna Vekic in the quarterfinals on Wednesday, while No. 30 Karolina Pliskova will face unseeded Magda Linett.