The fight for a ticket to the WTA Finals is heating up
With the top part of the ranking practically decided, the attention turns to several players who are tied on points and will compete for the last spots.
Once all the Grand Slams have been contested, the WTA tour enters the final stretch to define the 8 players who will compete in the WTA Finals from November 8 to 15 in Indian Wells. With the top spots practically defined, the focus is on the last positions, where players like Iga Swiatek will need to grit their teeth to avoid a major setback.
The first thing to highlight is that both Elena Rybakina and Aryna Sabalenka are already qualified. In this year's race, the Kazakh player has accumulated 7,492 points, while the Belarusian has 6,485. The cutoff for qualifying is 6,425 points, so both will focus their goal on the fight for number 1. At the US Open, Rybakina took the WTA throne from Sabalenka, but she is defending the title at the WTA Finals and may fall back to second place if she doesn't achieve good results in the final stretch of the year.
The other 3 names on the verge of securing their spots are Jessica Pegula (5,825 points), Coco Gauff (5,654 points), and Mirra Andreeva (5,614 points). The absence of any of these three would be a huge surprise, but starting from that top 5 there is a gap of nearly 1,000 points with the rest of the players, leading to a fierce battle for the remaining 3 positions for a tournament that has changed its venue from Riyadh to Indian Wells after breaking the contract with the Middle East one year before it was set to expire.
Swiatek and Kostyuk, out of the WTA Finals?
As of today, the other 3 qualifiers would be Elina Svitolina, Karolina Muchova, and Linda Noskova, but they have Iga Swiatek and Marta Kostyuk breathing down their necks. There are still WTA 500 tournaments in Guadalajara, Singapore, Ningbo, and Tokyo to be played, as well as the WTA 1000 in Beijing and Wuhan, so the choice of calendar and results for each of them will be key to the final outcome.
Beyond Iga, who occupies the 10th position in the race, names like Victoria Mboko, Sorana Cirstea, or Diana Shnaider are there, but they are more than 1,000 points behind the Polish player. Thus, it is likely that Swiatek and Kostyuk will be the only two contenders to break into the top 8 at the expense of Svitolina, Muchova, or Noskova. Everything remains to be decided in the Asian swing, which will be full of surprises and all-or-nothing matches.
This is an automatic translation. You can read the original news, La pelea por un billete a las WTA Finals, al rojo vivo