Tennis star Aryna Sabalenka is looking back at the moment in March 2024 when she learned that her ex-boyfriend, former professional hockey player Konstantin Koltsov, had died.
She was on the practice courts in Miami ahead of the Miami Open when, as she recalled to Vogue, she was approached by police with the news that he had died by apparent suicide.
“I was fighting with the cop — like, I couldn’t accept it,” Sabalenka, 28, said in the outlet’s May cover story, published on Monday, May 18.
Koltsov, who was 42 at the time, was in Miami to support Sabalenka when he died at the St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort. Though Sabalenka clarified at the time that she and Koltsov were no longer together, she said her heart was “broken.”
She ultimately played in the Miami Open just three days later, facing criticism for returning to the court so soon following her ex’s death. Sabalenka told Vogue that for her, the decision to compete was part of her personal grieving process.
“I don’t know if there’s any cliché about how you’re supposed to grieve,” she said. “I feel like in this situation, there is no right and wrong. We all need different things. For me, going back to work is the only way. I’m 28, but sometimes I think I’ve had everything in life that you could imagine.”
Sabalenka has said in the past that she went through something similar in 2019 when her father died suddenly of meningitis.
“Once, I lost my father and tennis helped me to go through that loss,” she told The Guardian in August 2024. “So at that moment [of Koltsov’s death] I thought I had to just keep going, keep playing, keep doing my thing to separate my personal life from my career life.”
She continued, “But at the end I would say I was struggling a lot healthwise because I didn’t stop. It was really emotional and really stressful, and kind of damaged my mental health at that point.”
It was ultimately a shoulder injury that forced Sabalenka to withdraw from Wimbledon in 2024, proving to the determined athlete that she needed to slow down.
“I realized it only after I was injured and had to step back that actually it was something much needed,” she told The Guardian. “It was really sad and I was struggling a lot not to play Wimbledon, of course, but at the same time I was able to take all the benefits from the time. I was doing a lot of rehab and treatment, but I was able to enjoy my life and my time away from tennis, and take all the good sides of not competing on tour.”
