Hailey Baptiste ended Aryna Sabalenka’s title defence in Madrid on Tuesday and halted the world No 1’s 15-match winning streak with a 2-6, 6-2, 7-6 (6) quarter-final victory to deliver the biggest shock of the tournament so far.
The American saved five match points at 4-5 in the decider and a sixth in the tie-break before she handed Sabalenka just her second defeat of the year and her first since the Australian Open final three months ago.
Sabalenka is a three-time champion in Madrid and reached the final in the Spanish capital in each of the last three editions of the event but was unable to shake off Baptiste, the 30th seed, who peppered her with huge serves and ultra-aggressive groundstrokes to reach a maiden WTA 1000 semi-final.
Baptiste came up with huge serves in several crucial moments – finishing the encounter with a total of 12 aces and 10 double faults – and even saved a match point with a bold serve-and-volley approach on her way to a memorable triumph in two and a half hours.
Next up for the 24-year-old Baptiste is Mirra Andreeva, the ninth seed, who gave herself an early birthday gift by defeating Canadian Leylah Fernandez 7-6 (1), 6-3 to reach her first Madrid semi-final. The Russian teenager, who turns 19 on Wednesday, was a recent champion in Linz and improved her clay-court record to 11-1 this season.
Meanwhile, Jannik Sinner suggested the Madrid Open organisers should reconsider their tournament scheduling to avoid late-night finishes like the one Rafael Jódar experienced in the third round on Sunday.
In a rare 11am local start on Tuesday, Sinner moved past British 19th seed Cameron Norrie 6-2, 7-5 to reach the quarter-finals. He explained he was put on first on Manolo Santana Stadium so that Jódar, his potential next opponent, would be scheduled in the afternoon to give the Spaniard time to recover from his three-set win over João Fonseca that ended at 1am on Monday morning.
“It’s quite unusual for me,” Sinner told Tennis TV about his early start. “I don’t know the last time I played at 11. But for me it doesn’t matter what time. I try to do my best. For me, there was a question if it would be me or Jódar to play at 4. But I think it’s right he plays at 4, because he finished very, very late.
“But at the same time, I feel like we need to make some adjustments to the scheduling of the day. Two matches [starting] from 8pm is very late. Even though you have one day in between. But still it’s very, very late. You finish at 1.30am, and you need to eat, you need to have treatment, so it’s very late. But we try to adapt ourselves, our bodies, our minds, so from my side it was a good performance today.”
In his first meeting with Norrie, Sinner won 81% of his first-serve points, and 63% of the points behind his second delivery on his way to recording a 25th consecutive victory at the Masters 1000 level.
“We know each other quite well. We practised a lot in the last tournaments, also. So, we both knew what to expect. I was serving well today in the important moments,” said Sinner, who awaits Jódar or Vit Kopriva in the last-eight stage. The world No 1 is just the second man in series history to win his first 20 Masters 1000 matches of the season, joining Novak Djokovic, who achieved that feat twice, in 2011 and 2015.
Sinner is competing in Madrid for just the fourth time in his career and is bidding to reach the semi-finals for the first time in the Spanish capital. “This surface is very, very different than all the other surfaces, so it’s very tough to get the right feedback,” Sinner said after his win over Norrie.
“Sometimes you feel like you’re not playing your best but from the outside it seems that you are, and sometimes it’s also the opposite. But I’m very happy to be in the quarters again. It’s a tournament I haven’t played a lot, so it means a lot to me and I’m happy to be through in two sets.”
Last week’s Barcelona champion Arthur Fils advanced to the quarter-finals at the Caja Mágica with a 6-3, 6-4 win over Argentinian 25th seed Tomás Martín Etcheverry. Fils, seeded 21 in Madrid, has made the quarter-finals in six of the seven tournaments he has contested so far in 2026. The Frenchman will take on Lorenzo Musetti or Jiri Lehecka for a place in the final four.