2017 Season Preview: WTA No. 5 Dominika Cibulkova

Over the first 10 days of 2017, we're examining the Top 10 players on the ATP and WTA tours—how will they fare during the new season? All of the previews can be found here.

Dominika Cibulkova’s meteoric trip from No. 38 at the start of 2016 to No. 5 by the end of the year was the biggest and happiest surprise of the WTA season. In 12 years on tour, the undersized, high-spirited Slovak—she’s just 5’3”—had never finished in the Top 10. After reaching the Australian Open final in 2014, she underwent ankle surgery the following year, and it seemed unlikely that she would reach those heights again. But Domi, the WTA’s resident Energizer Bunny, kept up her unflagging all-surface attack and began to see the dividends early in 2016. On hard courts, she won the title in Katowice and reached the finals in Acapulco and Wuhan; on clay, she reached the final at the Premier Mandatory event in Madrid; on grass she won the title in Eastbourne and made the quarterfinals at Wimbledon for the first time since 2011.

But all of that paled in comparison to the way Cibulkova ended her season. After losing her first two matches in the round-robin phase of the WTA Finals in Singapore, she played some of the best tennis of her career to beat Simona Halep, Svetlana Kuznetsova and Angelique Kerber to win her most important title. More than that, the always upbeat, always aggressive Cibulkova brought a surge of infectious enthusiasm to the court that the WTA can only hope spills over into 2017.

So what are the chances that Cibulkova keeps that run going into the new year? She’s 27, which by current standards puts her smack in the prime of her career. Judging by her own history, though, Cibulkova’s ups are usually followed by downs; after cracking the Top 10 for the first time in 2014, she was back in the 30s by the following year, and since reaching her first Slam final in Melbourne—also in 2014—she hasn’t been back to the semis at a major. The fact that she’s so much shorter than most of her top-ranked opponents means she has to play with significantly more risk and significantly less margin for error than they do. That’s tough to execute consistently.

But if Cibulkova stays healthy, she doesn’t have to win week in and week out. In 2016, she lost a lot of early-round matches, yet still reached the Top 5 because she also went deep at a lot of events. That’s the upside of being an Energizer Bunny: There’s always another tournament to play, and another ball to chase.