From the beginning, Leylah Fernandez was all over Anna Kalinskaya, crowding the baseline and running down virtually every ball.
But with the end in sight, at 4-1 in the second set, Fernandez visibly tightened. She lost the first two points on her serve and the Tennis Channel announcers broached the subject of the inevitable “complications.”
But the nerves they conjured evaporated as Fernandez geared up and won four straight points — the last two on an ace and another unreturnable serve.
Fernandez won the biggest title of her career on Sunday with a resounding 6-1, 6-2 win over Kalinskaya at the Mubadala Citi DC Open. With a strong field featuring four Top 20 players, this 70-minute result was totally unexpected.
Fernandez came into this Washington, D.C. tournament scuffling a bit. The 22-year-old Canadian hadn’t won a tournament in nearly two years, had a middling record of 3-3 at the Grand Slams and a losing record overall.
But amid the oppressive heat and humidity and on the hardcourts that seamlessly suit her game, Fernandez was unstoppable. She took out No. 1-seeded Jessica Pegula in the second round and backed it up with a terrific victory over No. 3 Elena Rybakina in the semifinals, in a match that ran 3 hours and 12 minutes.
This was Fernandez’s fourth career title, the first since Hong Kong in late 2023.
She’ll take away nearly $200,000 and those 500 PIF WTA Rankings points — but perhaps more important a growing confidence that maybe reaching that US Open final four years ago wasn’t some kind of random accident.
Emma Raducanu, who won that final, has talked about the difficulty that followed the breakthrough — the pressure and expectations, hers and everybody else’s. Fernandez acknowledges that she struggled with the same thing.
“It was mainly my own expectations,” Fernandez told wtatennis.com an hour after winning. “I played some great tennis in New York — a lot of my balls were going in. At some point, post-2021, I let my guard down a little bit. To be fair, my coach [and father Jorge] had warned me about it and I was just too naïve at the time to believe him.
“To say, `No, I’ve got to keep working, I’ve got to keep earning my spot. It’s not going to be easy here on out.’ So, post-US Open, it was hard to battle through that. And it’s still hard, because we’re still connected to that result until we both do another good result.”
This was also Fernandez’s seventh final and, despite the fact Kalinskaya is four years older, that championship experience showed up in the final. Kalinskaya — still a sparkling 9-3 in D.C. main draw matches — came in without a dropped a set, but now she’s 0-3 in Hologic WTA Tour finals.
Fernandez’s ranking will rise a dozen spots, to No. 24 on Monday, and she’ll play a first-round match, likely Tuesday, against Maya Joint for the second time in two weeks.
Fernandez spent a few minutes afterward fielding questions from wtatennis.com:
Your first title in almost two years, what does it mean to you?
It’s been a long, long couple of years with a lot of ups and downs. Getting this title is great not only for confidence and self-belief, but also for the whole team and family. The past couple of years, we’ve gone through a lot of tough moments. This trophy just indicates how much they have fought. And it shows me if they can fight through their difficulties, I can do it in a little tennis match with a tennis ball coming back at me. That’s the goal and the mentality.
Talking to you all week, you seemed so confident, so upbeat … based on the work you’ve been putting in, did you have any sense this might be a successful tournament for you?
I had no idea [laughing] it was going to be a nice tournament for me. I just went in thinking … enjoy my time. I put in the work, I put in the hours. The important thing was to get here and do what I trained for. If there’s things to work on — there’s always things to work on — and it will be good preparation for Montreal and Cincinnati. It’s a great steppingstone going into Canada.
You beat No. 1 seed Jessica Pegula and No. 3 seed Elena Rybakina. How does that make this title even more satisfying?
It’s very satisfying. We’ve gone through some very tough opponents, from the first round all the way through to the final. Maya [Joint], she’s a tough opponent and she’s had an amazing year. Playing Jess in Washington, it’s never easy. She loves hard courts, had some great results here. She wasn’t going to give me anything. Taylor [Townsend] was another battle, physically and mentally. I’ve played doubles with her and we’re pretty good friends, so setting that aside wasn’t easy. I was cramping and back in the locker room, I told her ‘You killed me.’ It wasn’t going to be an easy tournament from the get-go, so to get through all those tough opponents and challenges was great.
How does winning in DC help you prove to people — and maybe yourself — the US Open final was not a fluke?
It definitely helps a little bit. It gives us some good momentum going into bigger tournaments. To play against the big players here in Washington — it wasn’t an easy draw — it’s a good feeling to get my first 500. And I hope — hope — I can continue with that momentum the next few tournaments, but also stay grounded and not forget there’s a new beast every week. That we’ve just got to start from zero.