MELBOURNE: You wouldn't know it based on her past two years of tennis but there was once a time when world No.1 Aryna Sabalenka was almost crippled by the yips.
That may be extreme language to describe a player who was still a permanent fixture inside the top 10, but a mental block on second serve almost single-handedly sabotaged her ambition of winning grand slams for the calendar year of 2022.
Starting that season as the world No.2, the Belarusian star was one of the favourites to win the Australian Open until she got tennis' version of the hiccups.
Her matches at Melbourne Park that year were car crash television – hard to watch but impossible to look away. Still, she battled through to the fourth round, beating Aussie Storm Sanders and 31st seed Marketa Vondrousova along the way before the living nightmare came to an end at the hands of Kai Kanepi – a player who was outmatched but experienced enough to let her frustrated opponent slowly implode.
It was like that for the rest of the year, with the double fault tally for the season finishing at a whopping 428. Such was her mental strength that even with one of the fundamental skills of the game abandoning her, she still managed to finish the year ranked No.5 in the world, a semi finalist at the US Open and a finalist in the season ending WTA Finals.
To survive that year and put it behind her so quickly that she is now the hot favourite to win a third straight Australian Open title as the clear No.1 player in the world speaks to her unshakeable faith in her own ability as well as the raw talent and power that has been clear since she first stepped out on the tour.
Now 26, Sabalenka is in her prime and the mischievous smile on her face as she walks the halls of the player areas at Melbourne Park and the fun she has in classic post match interviews with Jelena Dokic tells a story of a player who is now totally comfortable in her own skin.
Watching the transformation from the sidelines, 2011 US Open champion Sam Stosur, who once battled a similar case of the yips on her trademark kick serve, has found herself in awe.
So, how did she do it?
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Aryna Sabalenka and Jelena Dokic dance. Â Nine
"I think a lot of players on the tour would love to know the exact answer to that," Stosur told Wide World of Sports' The Morning Serve, "because it's not something that's necessarily unusual in the tennis world.
"Lots of players go through problems with their serve. But she has done a phenomenal effort to go from where she was – two Aussie Opens ago really – to now being so dominant on serve and you really would have no clue that that's happened.
"And to do it so quickly and so confidently, huge props to her."
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Stosur shared her experience of going through the yips, describing the anxiety she felt when she went through a period where she couldn't deliver the kick serve that was her major weapon when she rose to No.4 in the world and beat prime Serena Williams to lift a major trophy.
"I went through a little stage of not enjoying my kick serve for a while, which was a really unsettling feeling, considering I could do it from when I was a little kid and then all of a sudden I didn't feel like I could use my best weapon anymore," Stosur said.
"I tried to keep it under wraps when I was playing but it really can be unsettling and unfortunately it can then flow into other parts of your game, which is obviously what you never want to happen."
Sabalenka takes to Rod Laver Arena again on Friday morning, in a third round clash with Clara Tauson that she'll be a short-priced favourite to breeze through.
Not until the latter stages of the tournament, where Coco Gauff looms as a likely semi-final opponent and five time major winner Iga Swiatek is a potential match-up in the final, are the true tests likely to come and if Sabalenka can fight her way past each challenger she'll move into elite company having won three Open titles in succession.
According to Stosur that would cement her legacy and potentially put her in the 'all-time great' category.
"Already she's one of the greatest players who's going to play, she's going to win many, many more grand slams, but if she could win three in a row here, considering it hasn't been done for 25 years and the last person to do it was Martina Hingis (1997, 1998, 1999), who is an absolute legend of our sport, it would set her right up the top there. So that would be a phenomenal achievement if she could achieve it."
