On the Tuesday before the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, Aryna Sabalenka, wearing a black crop top and wide-leg jeans, waltzed into the St. Regis for a grand-slam kickoff party hosted by Maestro Dobel, the official tequila of the U.S. Open that she represents.
After spending a few minutes playing a video game of herself playing tennis, she lounged in a back room decorated with floral wallpaper and velvet chairs, leisurely sipping the Marg-Aryna, a margarita made in her honor. “I like tequila; I feel like it’s much better on the body,” she says. She especially likes drinking reposado tequila. “You just sip it as a whiskey or Cognac, but it has a better taste, and the next day you feel great.”
Unlike many athletes, Sabalenka—the current world No. 1 and defending U.S. Open champion—is not shy about knocking them back. Last year she made it clear to the drunk and rowdy crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium that she was one of them when, after winning her semi-final match, she announced to the fans, “Drinks on me!” And after securing her victory in the final she outlined her next step: “We’re probably going to drink a lot.”
Word of her celebratory crawl around New York city that night—which included drinking, dining, and dancing until “two or three A.M.”—quickly endeared her to the city. “I think it was perfect,” she says. “There’s no better way to celebrate.”
Tennis-wise, however, she’s been suffering something of a hangover. In January she lost in the final of the Australian Open. In June she lost in the final of the French Open and landed in hot water after saying that her opponent, Coco Gauff, beat her “not because she played incredible, just because I made all of those mistakes.” In July she lost in the semi-finals at Wimbledon. Some players would have sacked their coach or doubled down on training. Sabalenka is not one of them.
After her Wimbledon disappointment she flew straight to Mykonos, where she sailed the Greek islands on a yacht with her boyfriend, the Brazilian acai-bowl millionaire Georgios Frangulis. They hit beach clubs such as Nammos and Scorpios. “We were on some wild beaches jumping from the boat, swimming around, having fun.... I had to recharge my batteries,” she says.
This high-energy side is regularly revealed to her 1.2 million TikTok followers. “The moment when I am overthinking stuff or I feel really tired or sad or low energy, I just put the TikTok on, and I’m like, ‘O.K., it’s time to learn a dance,’” she says. Every week—sometimes more often—she posts videos that almost always include her dancing with her team on the tennis court or in the gym. She even made up with Gauff, her French Open conqueror, by appearing with her in a TikTok dance. “It’s kind of like a hobby for me,” she says.
Now 27 years old, Sabalenka—who was born in Belarus and splits her time between Minsk and Miami—seems much more at ease than she did in 2023, when a Ukrainian tennis player refused to shake her hand at the French Open, in protest of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But with Sabalenka condemning the war, and distancing herself from the pro-Kremlin Belarusan president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, all the talk now is about her play on the court (and her celebrating off of it).
Will her diet of TikTok and tequila help her defend her U.S. Open crown? We’ll have to wait and see. But one thing is for certain. Sabalenka isn’t going to hold back in the city she loves. She’s already looking forward to visiting her favorite New York City spot—the Polo Bar. “It’s literally across the street [from my hotel],” she says with a grin.
Alyson Krueger is a New York–based lifestyle writer
