Aryna Sabalenka beat Taylor Townsend 6-4, 6-3 at the US Open on Sunday to reach the quarter-finals for a sixth straight year, extending one of the tournament’s most relentless runs. The win kept Sabalenka on course to defend her crown and moved her another step toward the late rounds she has made routine in New York.
The result mattered because Sabalenka did not cruise through it. She came back from 3-1 down in the second set, won the match with a fifth consecutive game and survived a contest that featured 10 breaks of serve. Townsend, who walked out in a long, black-feathered outfit, kept the crowd leaning her way and made the third seed work for every hold.
That pressure is why the scoreline tells only part of the story. Sabalenka has now won 18 consecutive matches at the US Open, a run that stretches back through her back-to-back titles in 2024 and 2025. She is the first woman to reach six consecutive singles quarter-finals at Flushing Meadows since Serena Williams in 2016, and she has done it while collecting 38 singles wins there since her main-draw debut in 2018.
Afterwards, Sabalenka said she was trying to stay focused on herself, ball by ball, and that turning around the second set was key. That was the split in the match: Townsend had the momentum and the noise, but Sabalenka kept finding a way back into the next point, then the next game, until the balance flipped.
The task now gets sharper. Sabalenka is three wins from matching Serena Williams’ run of three US Open titles in a row, and her next match is against Linda Noskova, who beat Marta Kostyuk 7-5, 5-7, 6-4 after needing six match points. If Sabalenka keeps moving through the draw, the question is no longer whether she belongs among the most dominant women in this tournament’s recent history. It is whether anyone can stop her from making that comparison unavoidable.
