Elena Rybakina moved into the Stuttgart quarterfinals on Thursday with a 6-2, 6-4 win over Diana Shnaider at the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix, needed just one hour and 12 minutes to do it, and never let the match drift far from her grip.
The top seed and World No. 2 was clean from the start, winning three of her five service games at love and taking 17 of the first 22 points on the way to a 4-1 lead in the opening set. She closed out the match with an ace, a neat finish to a meeting that was also the first between the two players on the WTA Tour.
The result sent Rybakina back to the Stuttgart quarterfinals after she skipped the 2025 edition and made her clay-season start in Madrid instead. It also kept alive her bid to repeat in a tournament she won in 2024, this time after coming in as the defending champion and top seed in an indoor event she said required a little adjustment after mostly training indoors before play began.
That adjustment mattered because Shnaider was the first left-hander Rybakina had faced in 2026, and the Kazakh said she even practiced with left-handed doubles specialist Desirae Krawczyk before the match. Rybakina said that help mattered because lefties are rare on tour, and she also needed time to get used to the light and the surroundings on these particular courts. She called the practice match “kind of a practice,” adding that Shnaider’s fast baseline game made the test useful if she met another left-hander later in the draw.
Shnaider briefly found a foothold in the second set, but a double fault opened the door for Rybakina to break again and keep control. The match never became a grind, and the straight-sets score reflected how little time Shnaider had to settle into any rhythm.
Rybakina now moves on to Leylah Fernandez, who edged Zeynep Sonmez 6-7, 6-1, 7-6 after staring at a 1-5 deficit in the third set. Rybakina has split four meetings with Fernandez, and their quarterfinal on clay will be their first on that surface. That brings a different challenge for Rybakina, who said she will need to focus a lot on the return and on her serve as well. For now, though, Stuttgart has given her the sort of start that tends to travel well in a week like this.
For readers following the wider tour conversation, the spotlight around coco gauff has also followed the season in its own way, with recent discussion around her natural hair and a Miu Miu ad drawing attention well beyond Stuttgart, including coverage of the backlash and her defense of the look.
