Elina Svitolina reached the Internazionali BNL d’Italia final with a hard-fought 6-4, 2-6, 6-2 semifinal win over Iga Swiatek. The two-time Foro Italico champion, victorious at the venue in 2017 and 2018, held firm after a second-set surge from the former world No. 1.

Svitolina had come into the match having survived a two-hour, 24-minute quarterfinal against Elena Rybakina the previous day. Her victory in Rome means she has now beaten the world No. 2 and the world No. 3 in back-to-back matches at the event.

“It’s amazing, the feeling is just unreal,” Svitolina said in an on-court interview. “After so many years, (to be) here again in the final is such an amazing feeling. And to do it in such a great way!”

The first set was narrowly decided, with Swiatek striking just seven winners against 24 unforced errors. Svitolina managed five winners and 12 unforced errors and benefited from the Pole dropping serve three times in the opener. Swiatek regrouped in the second set, opening 3-0 with a double break and raising her first-serve percentage from 52 percent in the first set to 81 percent in the second.

Svitolina’s defence carried her through the decider. She saved three break points in the opening game and then broke Swiatek to move ahead 3-0, a lead the Pole could not overturn.

The result leaves Swiatek without a title in 2026 and without a red-clay final this season ahead of Roland Garros. For Svitolina, the win sends her into her third final of 2026 and her second at the WTA 1000 level. She began the season by winning Auckland and was later runner-up in Dubai, where she lost to Jessica Pegula in the final.

Awaiting Svitolina on Saturday is world No. 4 Coco Gauff, who defeated No. 26 seed Sorana Cirstea 6-4, 6-3 to reach the final.

Mirra Andreeva was overcome by emotion following a straight-set defeat in the final of the Mutua Madrid Open, the latest in a series of high-stakes setbacks for the Russian teenager.

Andreeva fell 6-3, 7-5 to Marta Kostyuk, suffering her first career loss in three WTA 1000-level finals. She had used her temperament as fuel earlier in the week but was unable to carry it through while favoured against Kostyuk, losing in just under an hour and a half to the Ukrainian for the second time this year.

Once the match ended, Andreeva sat in her courtside chair and buried her face in her hands before addressing the crowd and her team. She thanked them “for always being there for [her] and supporting me at all times, when it’s easy and when it’s hard.”

As tears came, she said, “I’m sorry. I promised myself I’m not gonna cry. I’m sorry,” and placed her runner-up plate in her line of sight between her and her support team in the stands “because it’s easier like this,” she added. “I know it’s sometimes maybe not easy to work with me. But I really appreciate all your support and everything you do for me.”

Speaking to reporters later, Andreeva acknowledged the depth of her disappointment. “every time I lose, every time it’s like the end of the world to me.” She continued, “I don’t know, sometimes I see other players, like, smile right after the defeat, right after the matches they lost,” and added, “To me, I don’t understand how people do it. I wish I could do it.”

She described losing as “very disappointing and very painful to me,” and voiced a hope for emotional progress: “I hope that maybe in the future this can improve and I can maybe, after the match that I lose, I can talk about it right away and not take some time before starting to talk about it.” Despite what she called a “hard day,” Andreeva said she hoped to lift her spirits with a victory in Sunday’s doubles final alongside Diana Shnaider.

On April 26, 1976, Evonne Goolagong reached the top of the WTA rankings after winning the Virginia Slims Championships, the tournament now called the WTA Finals. That milestone went unrecognized at the time and remained absent from official lists until 2007, when missing paper records were uncovered in the WTA’s rankings archive.

The rankings in 1976 were calculated every two weeks. A review of the recovered documents showed Goolagong had overtaken Chris Evert for the No. 1 position for two weeks from April 26 to May 9, 1976. Although she had been recorded later as the 16th player ever announced as WTA No. 1, the corrected history establishes she was actually the second woman to hold the top spot, after Evert.

“I’m very proud of the achievement,” Goolagong told the Associated Press in 2007. “I was on a roll for that stretch in 1976. It was a great surprise to hear after all these years.” The WTA presented her with a No. 1 trophy in 2007, 31 years after the ranking change and 24 years after her retirement from the tour.

The ranking system was still new then, having been introduced five months earlier in November 1975. “Unfortunately our record-keeping wasn’t perfect in those early days of women’s tennis and our ranking system was viewed as a means of just accepting tournament entries,” then-WTA CEO Larry Scott said at the time. “It wasn’t until the early 1980s that the media and players started to pay attention to the changes in the rankings during the year as opposed to only the end-of-season rankings.”

The corrected entry adds to Goolagong’s distinguished resume: seven Grand Slam singles titles, including four Australian Opens (1974, 1975, 1976 and 1977), Roland Garros in 1971, and Wimbledon in 1971 and 1980. She won her final two majors—the December 1977 Australian Open and Wimbledon in 1980—as a mom, one of only three women in the Open Era to do so alongside Margaret Court and Kim Clijsters, and the only mother to win Wimbledon in that era.