Victoria Azarenka left Minsk at 15 and became Belarus's first major champion
At 15, Victoria Azarenka left Minsk to live and train in Scottsdale, Arizona, helped by an ice hockey goalie whose wife was a friend of her mother. Within seven years she was the world's top-ranked woman and the first Belarusian to win a Grand Slam singles title.
Born in Minsk in 1989, Azarenka grew up idolising Steffi Graf, calling Graf's 1988 Golden Slam her greatest motivation. Her move to the United States was eased by NHL goaltender Nikolai Khabibulin and his wife. The payoff came quickly: in 2005 she won the junior Australian and US titles, finished as junior world No. 1 and became the first Belarusian named world junior champion by the ITF.
Her rise on the senior tour was steady rather than sudden. She beat former top-ranked Martina Hingis at the 2007 US Open and won the mixed doubles there with fellow Belarusian Max Mirnyi, then took the 2008 French Open mixed title with Bob Bryan. Her first singles title came in Brisbane in January 2009, and a couple of months later she beat Serena Williams in the Miami final. That made her only the sixth teenager to win the women's title there, joining names like Graf and Monica Seles.
Her peak arrived in 2012 and 2013, when she won back-to-back Australian Open titles, the tournament whose junior event she had won years earlier. She held the No. 1 ranking for 51 weeks in total and ended 2012 at the top. At the London Olympics in 2012 she won bronze in singles and gold in mixed doubles with Mirnyi.
Williams remained her great obstacle in New York, beating her in the US Open finals of 2012 and 2013, and she reached a third final there in 2020, losing to Naomi Osaka. Across her career she won 21 tour-level singles titles and finished in the year-end top 10 every season from 2009 to 2013.
Source: Victoria Azarenka
