Madison Keys — using a mix of solid serves, power and defense — upset two-time defending champion and top seed Aryna Sabalenka 6-3, 2-6, 7-5 to win the Australian Open on Saturday, giving the 29-year-old American her first Grand Slam title in 46 tries.
Keys, the No. 19 seed, appeared in her first major semifinal 10 years ago in Melbourne, losing to eventual champion Serena Williams in straight sets. Since then, she’d played in five Grand Slam singles semis, reaching the finals only at the 2017 U.S. Open, where she lost 6-3, 6-0 to Sloane Stephens.
But on Saturday, she went toe to toe with Sabalenka, who added the 2024 U.S. Open title to her two Australian Open championships. The players were close statistically, including winners to unforced errors — 29 and 33 for Sabalenka to 29 and 31 for Keys. And the new champ won 92 total points to 91 for Sabalenka.
And there was no bigger point than the final one, when Keys cashed in the second of her match points to break Sabalenka’s serve for the fourth time on Saturday to win. And when her forehand winner led to championship point, Keys let out a scream of joy.
“I just kept telling myself, ‘Be brave, go for it, just kind of lay it all out on the line.’ At that point, no matter what happens, if I do that, then I can be proud of myself. It just made it a little bit easier,” Keys said in her post-match news conference.
Sabalenka came into the match 11-0 in 2025, winning a warm-up tournament in Brisbane. And she held a 4-1 head-to-head lead against Keys in her career.
But Keys put all of that out of her mind. After all, she’d already achieved so much in this fortnight, starting with the defeat of three top-10 seeds — Iga Swiatek, Danielle Collins and Elena Rybakina — before facing the fourth. The only woman to do that previously in a major was Australian Evonne Goolagong Cawley, who did it in 1980 at Wimbledon.
On the way to the championship, Keys also had to win five matches in three sets, which she said helped her.
“There was a confidence in maybe not playing matches amazingly from start to finish and having some dips here and there,” she said. “But being able to kind of end on a really high note each time and figure out how to get back in matches or how to close out a match really well. I just slowly started continuing to build the confidence. I never really got ahead of myself in each round. I never once thought about the next round until I was actually there.”
And she played with a new mindset.
“I really felt like going into each match that if I could just try to go out, play how I wanted to play, I was really just going to give myself the opportunity to try to win the match,” Keys said. “I felt like not stressing about things that I couldn’t control, I just felt like I was able to play a little bit more free.”
She became the fourth-oldest first-time major winner in the Open Era. She is the first woman to beat both the No. 1 and No. 2 players in the world in the final two rounds of a major since Venus Williams did it at Wimbledon in 2005.
Keys eliminated Swiatek, of Poland, in the semifinal.
When the new rankings come out on Monday, Keys will tie her career high at No. 7.
And Sabalenka, from Belarus, said Keys earned the match on Saturday.
“If she can play consistently like that, it’s not much you can do,” Sabalenka said. “I know how to play against her, but in this match I couldn’t really do my stuff.
“She just played incredible. It seems like she was overhitting everything. The depths of the balls were really crazy. I was trying my best. Obviously didn’t work well.”
–Field Level Media
