On a temperate evening in Melbourne, 19th seed Madison Keys of the United States faced off against hardcourt queen (and world number one) Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus in the 2025 Australian Open women’s singles final, clinching the match 6-3, 2-6, 7-5.
The win came more than seven years after Keys’s first (and, until this year, only) appearance in a major final—at the 2017 US Open, where she played a fairly disastrous match against Sloane Stephens.
A different result for Sabalenka, meanwhile, would have made her only the seventh player in history to win the title here three years in a row, after victories over Elena Rybakina in 2023 and Qinwen Zheng in 2024.
Both players are big hitters, but the first set was a largely one-sided contest, spelling trouble for Sabalenka from her very first game: Double-faulting twice, she gave Keys an early break. From then, the hard work that Keys had been doing on both her service and return games with Bjorn Fratangelo, her coach and husband, was in evidence. (It’s not for nothing that she’d won 13 of her first 14 matches of 2025 going into today’s final, despite a tough draw at this tournament.) Focused and calm, she looked strong, attacking and defending with equal power. Though Sabalenka got on the board after her second game, Keys was up a double break (4-1) just 17 minutes into the match, with commentators noting that she seemed to be picking up where she’d left things during her astonishing semifinal against Iga Świątek on Thursday—a three-set scorcher.
