Hailey Baptiste Stuns World No 1 Sabalenka at Madrid Open as Sinner Advances and Calls for Scheduling Reform

Hailey Baptiste produced one of the most significant upsets of the 2026 tennis season on Tuesday, eliminating Aryna Sabalenka from the Madrid Open quarter-finals with a 2-6, 6-2, 7-6 (6) victory that ended the world No 1’s 15-match winning streak.

The 24-year-old American, ranked 30th in the world, found herself facing elimination at 4-5 in the deciding set, saving five consecutive match points before rescuing a sixth during the tie-break to seal a memorable win in two and a half hours. The result handed Sabalenka only her second defeat of the year and her first since the Australian Open final three months ago.

Baptiste’s aggressive approach proved decisive throughout the contest. She recorded 12 aces and deployed a bold serve-and-volley tactic to save one of those match points, though her game was not without risk — she also committed 10 double faults across the match. Sabalenka, a three-time Madrid champion who had reached the final in each of the last three editions of the tournament, was unable to neutralise the American’s powerful groundstrokes and big serving in the crucial stages.

Baptiste will now face ninth seed Mirra Andreeva in the semi-finals. The Russian teenager, who turns 19 on Wednesday, defeated Canadian Leylah Fernandez 7-6 (1), 6-3 to advance to her first Madrid semi-final. Andreeva, a recent champion in Linz, improved her clay-court record to 11-1 this season with the victory.

On the men’s side, world No 1 Jannik Sinner defeated British 19th seed Cameron Norrie 6-2, 7-5 in an unusual 11am local start on Manolo Santana Stadium, progressing to the quarter-finals in Madrid for the fourth time in his career. The scheduling decision was made to allow Spanish wildcard Rafael Jódar — a potential Sinner opponent — additional recovery time after his third-round win over João Fonseca concluded at 1am on Monday morning.

Sinner won 81% of his first-serve points and 63% on second serve against Norrie in their first-ever meeting, extending his winning run at Masters 1000 level to 25 consecutive matches. The Italian is only the second player in Masters 1000 history to win his first 20 matches of the season at that level, joining Novak Djokovic, who accomplished the feat twice — in 2011 and 2015.

Despite the positive result, Sinner used his post-match platform to raise concerns about the tournament’s scheduling practices. Speaking to Tennis TV, he acknowledged the organisational gesture toward Jódar but argued that broader changes were needed. “It’s quite unusual for me. I don’t know the last time I played at 11. But for me it doesn’t matter what time. I try to do my best,” he said. “But at the same time, I feel like we need to make some adjustments to the scheduling of the day. Two matches [starting] from 8pm is very late. Even though you have one day in between. But still it’s very, very late. You finish at 1.30am, and you need to eat, you need to have treatment, so it’s very late. But we try to adapt ourselves, our bodies, our minds, so from my side it was a good performance today.”

Sinner, who is bidding to reach the Madrid semi-finals for the first time in his career, also reflected on the challenges of competing on clay. “This surface is very, very different than all the other surfaces, so it’s very tough to get the right feedback,” he said. “Sometimes you feel like you’re not playing your best but from the outside it seems that you are, and sometimes it’s also the opposite. But I’m very happy to be in the quarters again.”

He will face either Jódar or Vit Kopriva in the quarter-finals. Sinner and Norrie, who have practised together frequently on the tour, both entered the match with a clear tactical understanding of one another. “We know each other quite well. We practised a lot in the last tournaments, also. So, we both knew what to expect. I was serving well today in the important moments,” Sinner added.

Elsewhere in the draw, Frenchman Arthur Fils — last week’s Barcelona Open champion — advanced to the quarter-finals with a 6-3, 6-4 win over Argentinian 25th seed Tomás Martín Etcheverry. Fils, seeded 21st in Madrid, has now reached the last eight in six of the seven tournaments he has played in 2026. He will face either Lorenzo Musetti or Jiri Lehecka for a place in the semi-finals.