In an match billed as tennis’s newest “Battle of the Sexes,” Aryna Sabalenka, the No. 1-ranked ladies’s tennis participant on the earth, will tackle Nick Kyrgios, who’s lately ranked No. 673 at the males’s excursion, on Dec. 28, 2025, in Dubai.
“This is about respect, rivalry and reimagining what equality in sport can look like,” defined Stuart Duguid, who, in conjunction with tennis nice Naomi Osaka, co-founded Evolve, the sports activities company placing at the match.
“I’ll try my best to kick his ass,” Sabalenka mentioned right through a September 2025 press convention.
“She’s not going to beat me,” Kyrgios replied. “Do you really think I have to try 100%?”
Evolve has promoted the Dubai match as a sequel to the long-lasting 1973 “Battle of the Sexes,” by which Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs.
However as crucial students of recreation, we see vital variations between the 2 contests. For one, there are the principles: other courtroom dimensions, carrier restrictions and scoring programs. What’s extra, the 2 occasions’ political and cultural contexts set them even additional aside. Whilst King’s victory is seen as a feminist conquer entrenched sexism, neither Sabalenka nor Kyrgios appear to be taking part in for anything else past the courtroom.
It makes us ponder whether ladies – and girls’s sports activities extra particularly – have anything else to realize from this newest combat.
Striking ‘women’s lib’ at the map
The feminist motion of the early Nineteen Seventies noticed American ladies battle for higher rights, alternatives, rewards, reproductive freedoms and physically autonomy. Additionally they sought get admission to to and equality in sports activities. Girls’s tennis led the way in which, as King and others bravely shaped their very own excursion, unionized and negotiated for equivalent pay on the U.S. Open.
Riggs – a 55-year-old ex-champion and self-proclaimed “male chauvinist pig” – used to be a loud antagonist. He maintained that higher pay will have to move to males like him at the senior excursion, to not ladies. To end up it – and to bully his long ago into the limelight – Riggs pestered the 29-year-old King to play him.
Bobby Riggs used to be carried to the courtroom through a bunch of younger women forward of his tennis fit in opposition to Billie Jean King on the Houston Astrodome on Sep. 20, 1973.
Bettmann/Getty Photographs
“You not only cannot beat a top male player,” he needled, “you can’t beat me, a tired old man.”
King refused.
“We didn’t need him; we were making it on our own merits,” she later defined
Billie Jean King throws her racket within the air after defeating retired professional Bobby Riggs on the Houston Astrodome on Sep. 20, 1973.
UPI/Bettmann Archive by way of Getty Photographs
But if Riggs trounced the No. 1 ladies’s participant, Margaret Court docket, in Would possibly 1973, King, then ranked No. 2, felt she had no selection.
“Marge blew it,” she instructed newshounds. “I’m going to put women’s lib where it should be.”
King rose to the instance. Earlier than 30,000 spectators on the Houston Astrodome and any other 90 million tv audience, she walloped Riggs in 3 instantly units. Her victory took on an excellent greater importance, changing into an emblem of what ladies can accomplish when given the danger.
“It wasn’t about tennis,” King later assessed. “It was about social change.”
The apolitical celebrity vs. the ‘bad boy’
So what, then, is the brand new “battle” about?
King has but to remark at the 2025 match, however she is partial to Sabalenka’s recreation.
“What I love about you is that when you come out to play, you bring all of yourself,” King instructed the four-time Grand Slam champion after her 2024 U.S. Open victory.
Off the courtroom, on the other hand, the 2 ladies appear to have little in not unusual.
King has all the time maintained that sports activities are political; Sabalenka has distanced herself from that place. When requested about Russia’s struggle in Ukraine, as an example, the Belarusian defined, “I don’t want sport to be involved in politics, because I’m just a 25-year-old tennis player.”
King by no means argued that ladies had been higher gamers than the lads. However “from a show-biz standpoint,” she clarified in her 1974 autobiography, “I felt we put on as good a performance as the men – sometimes better – and that that’s what people paid to see.”
Sabalenka, against this, as soon as instructed a reporter that she prefers observing males’s tennis as a result of “it’s more interesting” than the ladies’s recreation.
Feedback like Sabalenka’s throw sand into the gears of the continuing battle for gender fairness, to which King stays dedicated. Even supposing all 4 Grand Slam occasions now be offering equivalent prize cash, disparities persist at lower-level tournaments.
On the 2024 Italian Open, for example, males competed for a prize pool of US$8.5 million. The ladies’s identical used to be $5.5 million. That very same yr, ladies’s prize cash on the Canadian Open totaled $2.5 million, whilst the lads cut up $5.9 million. Males nonetheless obtain higher scheduling and courtroom assignments, extra media protection and extra profitable sponsorships. As former No-2-ranked ladies’s tennis participant Ons Jabeur put it, it’s no longer “just a question of money, but also respect.”
In the meantime, Kyrgios, like Riggs greater than part a century in the past, has spoken out in opposition to equivalent pay for girls gamers.
In reality, some would possibly say Kyrgios’ sexism makes Riggs’ appear virtually old fashioned. In 2015, he used to be fined $10,000 after making vulgar feedback about his opponent’s lady friend right through a fit. In 2021, he pleaded to blame to assaulting his ex-girlfriend after pushing her right through a controversy.
Kyrgios has “gone to all lengths” to distance himself from openly misogynist influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate, who’ve been criminally charged with human trafficking, rape and attack. However this used to be handiest after Kyrgios confronted important backlash for expressing “low-key” love for the brothers and reposting Andrew on social platform X for “speaking facts as usual.”
Nick Kyrgios has earned a name because the ‘bad boy of tennis.’
Daniel Pockett/Getty Photographs
Kyrgios – once more, like Riggs – could also be suffering to stay related.
By way of all accounts, he’s a enormously proficient participant who has but to are living as much as his possible. Plagued with wrist and knee accidents, Kyrgios has competed in handiest six tour-level suits prior to now 3 years: profitable one, shedding 4 and retiring in any other. In consequence, the 2022 Wimbledon finalist, as soon as ranked within the most sensible 20, is healthier referred to as a “bad boy of tennis” who smashes rackets, makes lewd feedback and gestures, tanks suits and verbally abuses umpires.
A lose-lose for girls’s sports activities?
Kyrgios’ showdown with Sabalenka is also entertaining. However for girls’s sports activities, it sort of feels like a lose-lose.
If Sabalenka wins, critics will most likely declare it’s as a result of she had each and every merit. Evolve has changed the principles to make her facet of the courtroom 9% smaller than Kyrgios’ in each duration and width. The scale are in keeping with Evolve’s calculation that the highest ladies gamers transfer 9% slower than their male opposite numbers, even though there’s no printed knowledge to toughen the declare.
To additional mitigate Kyrgios’ reported “power and speed advantage,” each gamers shall be restricted to only one serve. In contrast to King and Riggs’ best-of-five units, Sabalenka and Kyrgios will play best-of-three. Cut up units between the 2 competition will lead to a 10-point tiebreaker.
A Kyrgios victory will handiest bolster arguments that the most productive lady can’t compete with the 673rd-ranked guy, even if the principles are bent to her want. Lets see the ones arguments being weaponized in opposition to ladies’s sports activities extra most often, which stay underresourced and undervalued.
There’s additionally the query of the venue.
The 2025 match will happen within the United Arab Emirates. The UAE executive has been accused of egregious human rights abuses, which come with gender discrimination, the criminalization of same-sex family members, and clamping down on freedom of speech and the media. Website hosting high-profile carrying occasions distracts from those problems whilst cleaning the UAE’s public symbol in what’s referred to as “sportswashing.”
What does it imply to host a tennis “Battle of the Sexes” in a rustic the place ladies are scuffling with for elementary human rights?
The 2017 Hollywood movie “Battle of the Sexes” reaffirmed the significance of the King-Riggs contest.
Barring some wonder twist, nobody will make a film in regards to the Sabalenka-Kyrgios duel in Dubai. We see it as not anything greater than a exposure stunt and money grasp for Sabalenka, Kyrgios and, above all, Evolve. If that is “reimagining what equality in sport can look like,” because the organizers declare, then it’s equality with out substance.
And that’s no combat in any respect.
