Within 48 hours of her Paris collapse, Elena Rybakina had already rewritten her summer. A shock second-round loss at Roland Garros, her dream of climbing to the top of the WTA rankings put on hold, and within days she had rearranged her schedule and added Queen’s Club to her grass season. The 2022 Wimbledon champion and reigning Australian Open champion has more to prove this summer than at any other point this year, and she has given herself the best possible preparation.

Her grass season is now the most extensive she has had in years. She will play in the HSBC Championships at Queen’s Club in London from June 8 to 14. Rybakina enters as a late replacement for the injured Linda Noskova and is already seeded first in the tournament. Serena Williams is another attraction at that tournament, as she is scheduled to return to competition there.

After Berlin, a grass-court WTA 500 event, she moves to Bad Homburg (June 22–29), the week before Wimbledon, where she has previously excelled. Then there’s Wimbledon, which runs from June 29 to July 12, and everything she’s worked toward on this stretch of grass has always been pointed in one direction. Her grass season fell short of expectations last year, as she reached the quarterfinals in Berlin and was eliminated in the third round at Wimbledon.

Since then, she has won a WTA Finals title, defeating world number one Aryna Sabalenka in the final, and the Australian Open title in January 2026. Currently, Rybakina is separated from Sabalenka by 947 points for the world number one spot. The difference between who she was on grass in 2025 and who she is heading into 2026 is significant.

Rybakina is a dangerous grass-court player, with a big serve and powerful groundstrokes that suit the surface well. She first reached the semi-finals of a grass event, the Libéma Open, in 2019 in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. She won Wimbledon in 2022, defeating Ons Jabeur 3-6, 6-2, 6-2, and was heavily favored in 2024 but lost in the semifinals to eventual champion Barbora Krejcikova. This year at Queen’s Club, she is the top seed and, by most accounts, the title favorite.

A French Open That Left Questions Unanswered for Elena Rybakina

The grass season follows Rybakina’s Roland Garros campaign, which she will want to put behind her as soon as possible.

Elena Rybakina arrived in Paris as strong contender, having chipped away at Sabalenka’s No. 1 ranking after Australian Open and Stuttgart wins. She would have been world number one if she had managed to win the French Open. World No. 55 Yuliia Starodubtseva defeated Rybakina 3-6, 6-1, 7-6(4) in the second round.

She made 71 unforced errors throughout the match and struggled to find rhythm in the Paris heat. She admitted in her press conference that she simply did not have the energy. “I thought that I could raise the level, but actually today it was a very bad performance with too many unforced errors. Definitely, the energy wasn’t there. I just couldn’t find the right balance on the ball,” she said after her loss. The loss cost her the opportunity to surpass Sabalenka at the top of the WTA rankings.

Perhaps that is the motivation behind this grass schedule, which feels unlike any other she has undertaken. She is a better player now than she was in previous seasons. Her fast and strong serve is her best weapon in the game on fast surfaces, and Wimbledon is exactly that. The questions that Paris left unanswered will have to wait for four weeks.