MELBOURNE, Australia — On the face of it, Elina Svitolina’s 2025 season was decent.

A 36-15 record. A title at the Rouen Open. A semifinal at the Madrid Open. Quarterfinals at the Australian Open, Indian Wells, and the French Open.

By early summer though, Svitolina was running on fumes. Only those closest to her knew the truth, though it started to emerge in her results as she trudged through the North American summer swelter. She followed a quarterfinal loss in the Canadian Open in early August with first-round exits in Cincinnati and the U.S. Open.

She lasted one more event, leading Ukraine in the Billie Jean King Cup in September, where she won one match and lost another. After that, she was too fried to continue and packed it in for the rest of the year.

“Sometimes you need a little bit to step back and try to stay away from it,” she said last week during a news conference. “Just try to regroup and be, again, back with new energy.”

So… that worked!

A tennis player can’t start any season better than 31-year-old Svitolina has begun 2026.

She went to the Auckland Open in New Zealand and won the title. Then she came to the Australian Open and has reeled off another five victories. In all, she is 10-0 to start the season, with wins here in Melbourne over Mirra Andreeva, the No. 8 seed who had played the best tennis of the tournament’s first week, and Coco Gauff, a two-time Grand Slam champion. She has lost just a single set in the 10 matches.

Svitolina’s run is, in one way, illustrative of the contours of the tennis season.

Nearly everyone agrees that it is too long. By late summer, if not earlier, the bright optimism of January in Australia that can stretch through the first half of the year has faded for so many. But the carrot-and-stick of money and missed ranking points lead most of the field to set aside injury and exhaustion and grind on, even though they know better.

“If you’re mentally tired, your injuries start as well,” Alexander Zverev, who occasionally muddles through against better judgment, said Tuesday after his win over Learner Tien in the men’s quarterfinals.

Svitolina has battled through some tough injuries the past few years, including surgery to remove a cyst on her foot and a stress fracture in her ankle. Both forced her to miss significant stretches. But taking time away on this occasion was not about injury. It was about self-preservation.

“Over the years, I’ve learned that this sport isn’t about money, fame or ranking,” Svitolina wrote on social media in September. “It’s about being ready to fight and give your all. Right now, I’m simply not at the level mentally or emotionally to do that. Not every day has to be productive, strong or full of energy. Some days are heavy – and that doesn’t make me weak. It just means I’m human and need time to rest, to feel, to breathe, to just be.”

Her husband, the legend of French tennis that is Gaël Monfils, had a close-up view as Svitolina edged toward a breaking point — all while living through the knowledge that her relatives have been living through one of their own the past four years, since Russia invaded Ukraine.

Svitolina’s grandmother still lives in Odesa, Ukraine’s third biggest city. She has relatives and friends all over the country, but especially in Kyiv and Kharkiv, where she trained as a teenager and usually visits a couple of times a year, even though it’s just a few miles from the ongoing conflict’s front lines.

“She’s doing a lot of things to get fit, to get good, a lot of things outside of tennis for her country, outside as a mom, and also outside with me as a couple,” Monfils said last week, after his own first-round defeat at the Australian Open. “She’s extremely strong, but sometimes I think the body, and even the mind, has to recharge. It was a great decision for her. Was not easy, to be honest. But we were there — her family, myself, to tell her that that was the right decision.”

Svitolina’s idea of rest can be a little different from most players. She has a young child. She also rarely takes a break from raising awareness and money for her foundation, which provides relief to Ukraine.

That said, getting off the hamster wheel of the tour for an extra month has made all the difference in her view. She knew she could have pushed through. But after more than a decade on the tour, she understood how to play the long game.

A good run in October might have landed her in the WTA Tour Finals, but a good rest through the fall, ahead of the preseason, has allowed her to be strong for the first Grand Slam of the year, in her mind but also in her body.

There is not much subtlety to Svitolina’s game, and there never has been. She swings hard. She runs hard. “It’s really pushing the limits,” she said.

Still, aside from her pregnancy and maternity leave and injuries, she’d never taken an extensive break. So she didn’t know how she would respond. Preseason felt strong. She didn’t have to hold back and work through nagging injuries from the previous season.

She and her coach, Andrew Bettles, spent a good bit of time focusing on her serve and her return — work that was evident in her past two matches against Andreeva and Gauff, as she feasted on their second serves, arguably the weakest part of their games. Against Andreeva, she won 75 percent of points on her opponent’s second serve. Against Gauff, it was 82 percent.

Yet, the biggest difference, she said, is how fresh and ready she feels in difficult moments. In the past, she felt most burned-out in such situations and during hard matches, often at the back-end of tournaments.

That hasn’t been true during this first month of this season. She had an early test in Auckland, where she won a third-set tiebreak with Sonay Kartal in the quarterfinals, and then came through two more tiebreaks, one each in the semifinals and final, to take the title.

Australia has been more stress-free – just one tiebreak in 10 sets. But there has been another sort of stress that always looms. She has faced two Russians, bringing an additional emotional edge to the match. She beat them both, including a high-flying Andreeva. That stretched her record against Russians since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine to 12-2, an 86 percent winrate. Her winning percentage against everyone else is 64 percent.

There is little doubt Svitolina has extra motivation when she plays, knowing national morale may be riding on the result, given that she is among her country’s biggest sports heroes.

After the Gauff match, the messages of support rolled across social media.

“One of the toughest winters for Ukrainian people, and without electricity and everything, so I feel like bringing this light, a little light, you know, even just positive news to Ukrainian people, to my friends when they are watching my matches, of course, it’s a great feeling for me,” she said.

She will need every bit of energy and inspiration in the semifinals against Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 1 and two-time Australian Open champion. Sabalenka is from Belarus. Svitolina has not shaken the hand of a player from Russia or Belarus since 2022.

They have met four times since then, and Sabalenka has won every match.

Whatever unfolds on-court tomorrow (Thursday), Svitolina said the break and 10 consecutive wins have her prepared for it.

“I’m ready to face difficult situations in the matches,” she said after beating Andreeva. “I’m ready to accept that sometimes things are not going your way, and you have to fight, you have to dig deep and try to find a way to win.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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