Elena Rybakina, the world No. 9 and 2022 Wimbledon champion, attributed her heartbreaking semifinal loss at the 2025 National Bank Open in Montreal to a combination of a hostile crowd and her failure to capitalize on critical moments. In a post-match press conference reported by tennis365.com on August 7, 2025, Rybakina confessed, “It wasn’t very pleasant, all the screaming and whistling during my serve. It’s not nice, and it did affect me, especially in those big moments.” She lost to 18-year-old Canadian Victoria Mboko 1-6, 7-5, 7-6(4) in a three-hour thriller, despite holding a match point at 5-4 in the third set and two chances to serve out the match.
Rybakina dominated the first set 6-1, leveraging her powerful serve and aggressive baseline play, but her game unraveled in the second set as Mboko, buoyed by the home crowd at IGA Stadium, broke her serve three times. In the third set, Rybakina led 5-3 but faltered, committing three unforced errors in the tiebreak, as noted by @JacobPacheco6 on X. “I should have closed it out. I had the match point, I was serving for it twice, but I got tight and didn’t play those points well,” Rybakina admitted, per TennisUpToDate2. She acknowledged Mboko’s resilience, saying, “She played fast and fearless, but the crowd gave her that extra push.”
The loss marked Rybakina’s second Montreal semifinal appearance (also in 2023), but her inability to convert key opportunities, compounded by crowd distractions, prevented her from reaching the final. This defeat adds to a challenging 2025, where she reached the Dubai semifinals and Wimbledon third round but lost to Mirra Andreeva at Indian Wells and Aryna Sabalenka at Bad Homburg, despite holding match points in the latter.
