MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Jessica Pegula has a problem — the same problem as the rest of women’s tennis right now.

Pegula, the 32-year-old American who is having the latest and greatest blossoming of an already late-blooming career, keeps making it to the end of the biggest tournaments and running into the barricade that Elena Rybakina, the world No. 2, and Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 1, have set up at the top of the sport,

She ran into it again Wednesday at the Miami Open. Pegula played a whale of a match against Rybakina, the reigning Australian Open champion. She won 100 points. Rybakina won 98.

Pegula lost.

Every time she had a chance, either to surge ahead in the second set or to reel her opponent in during the third, Rybakina slammed the door shut — just like she did on two more really big stages: the semifinals of January’s Australian Open and November’s WTA Tour Finals.

Sabalenka beat her in the semifinals of the U.S. Open, and at the Tour Finals as well, though Pegula snuck out a win between those two in at the Wuhan Open in China.

“I can’t be upset that I’m losing to like the two best players in the world,” Pegula said after the 2-6, 6-3, 6-4 loss before heading out for a doubles match. “People may rag on, ‘Oh, what do you have to do to beat them,’ or, you know, ‘Why haven’t you beaten them?’ But at the same time … I don’t know.’”

Not many people beat them these days. Rybakina is now 21-4 this season. Sabalenka is 20-1 after beating Hailey Baptiste, the aggressive and rising American with a sweet game laced with variety, 6-4, 6-4.

Baptiste matched Sabalenka until crunch time arrived, along with the errors and the double faults, and that was that. Sabalenka did what she has done all year except in the Australian Open final against, of course, Rybakina, who beat Baptiste in three sets earlier this month at the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells.

“She didn’t give me much at all in her service games, and when she got the opportunities in my service games, she took them and she went after them,” Baptiste said of Sabalenka. “That’s why she’s where she is.”

On Thursday, Sabalenka and Rybakina will do something that might not happen for a while: They will play a semifinal. The Miami Open held its women’s singles draw March 15, the day of the Indian Wells final and one day before Rybakina officially took the world No. 2 ranking from Iga Świątek, the dominant player of the past four years.

Rybakina’s name emerged on Sabalenka’s side of the draw, giving Coco Gauff and Karolína Muchová what could be their last chance for a while to get to the final of a big tournament without facing either of them, and to win it by only beating one.

Rybakina and Sabalenka aren’t Sinner and Alcaraz yet, and Świątek and Gauff will likely ensure that they never get that far, but they have not been far off the past six months.

They split the past two Grand Slams and the two other most important tournaments, the WTA Tour Finals and Indian Wells, where they faced each other in the final on both occasions.

Pegula has thoughts on why this dynamic has emerged.

“On big pressure points, the amount of times they go for big second serves or they go for big returns or, they hit a big 1-2 punch, serve first ball, or rip a winner on a break point,” she said of Sabalenka and Rybakina. “It takes a lot of confidence to do that.”

For Rybakina, that confidence works like a snowball rolling down a hill. She’s played a lot of close matches in the past six months, with a lot of big moments.

“My coaches always tell me about these moments, when I need to push myself more, when I need to put this extra energy on the serve, stay more intense in these rallies,” she said in a news conference. “And I think  that for now, when I listen and when I’m able to show it, of course it works.”

Sabalenka said that for her, the key to her supremacy has been doing something like the opposite of that. For her, success has come from not thinking about her matches in terms of big moments. Each moment is just as big or small as every other one.

“Focus on the game plan, not take it like too, too far, like too emotional,” she said. “That’s why I’m able to pull out really great tennis on the key moments, just because I don’t think about those moments as the key moments.”

For Pegula and the rest of the field it all adds up to a pile of frustration, especially on a day like Wednesday, when the score sheet said she played just as well or maybe even better than Rybakina on the whole. Rybakina’s 15 aces went a long way toward putting her away.

All she and the rest of the tour can do is keep swinging, and keep trying to match the standard.

“I’ve elevated my game,” she said. “I’ve gotten better. I’ve become a better player. I think that I am definitely challenging them, both of them, and that’s kind of all I can kind of ask of myself, and then hopefully, you know, some of the wins will come along.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Tennis, Women's Tennis

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