Anisimova's moment: Beats Sabalenka to make first Slam final at Wimbledon

WIMBLEDON -- As the baking temperatures of Wimbledon's first two days returned, No. 13 seed Amanda Anisimova kept a cool head to reach the first Grand Slam final of her career, defeating No. 1 seed Aryna Sabalenka 6-4, 4-6, 6-4 in 2 hours and 37 minutes.

Wimbledon: Scores | Order of play | Draws

The result is Anisimova's sixth career Top 5 win, and first over a reigning World No. 1. Four of those Top 5 wins have come over Sabalenka, against whom she now holds a 6-3 head-to-head record with wins on every surface.

The 23-year-old American becomes the first player born in the 21st century to reach the Wimbledon final; No. 8 seed Iga Swiatek could become the second, should she defeat Belinda Bencic in the second semifinal. Anisimova is the seventh player born in the 21st century to reach any major final, following Bianca Andreescu, Swiatek, Emma Raducanu, Leylah Fernandez, Coco Gauff and Zheng Qinwen.

A star junior who quickly brought her prodigious talent to the Hologic WTA Tour, reaching the 2019 Roland Garros semifinals as a 17-year-old, Anisimova's path to this moment has not been straightforward. In 2023, she took a seven-month mental health break from tennis. This time last year, she was on the comeback trail, but at No. 189 was ranked too low to get into the Wimbledon main draw; she fell in qualifying to Eva Lys.

But since then, Anisimova has rocketed into the Top 20 following her first WTA 1000 final in Toronto last August, then her first WTA 1000 title in Doha this February. She is guaranteed to make her Top 10 debut next Monday. She also becomes just the second player in the Open Era to reach a major final after losing in the previous year's qualifying event, following Andreescu at the 2019 US Open.

Anisimova's six-year, 34-day gap between her first two major semifinals is the fourth-longest in the Open Era (behind Mirjana Lucic-Baroni, Natasha Zvereva and Lori McNeil); fellow semifinalist Bencic is in fifth place with a 5-year, 309-day gap between the 2019 US Open and this week.

Sabalenka falls to 0-3 in Wimbledon semifinals, following her losses to Karolina Pliskova in 2021 and Ons Jabeur in 2023. Her 12 career major semifinals are the most of any player since Maria Sharapova, and she has converted three of those into titles.

More to come...

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