WTA World No.1 Ashleigh Barty has won the WTA Player of the Year, taking 82% of the media vote to win the award.
The Australian enjoyed a memorable 2019, in which she won her first major at Roland Garros, took Premier Mandatory glory in Miami and reached the top ranking in the sport for the first time. It was then capped by winning the Shiseido WTA Finals Shenzhen, the richest competition in the history of tennis, as she defeated Elina Svitolina, 6-4, 6-3 in the final.
Read more: 2019 WTA Player Award Winners Announced
Barty arrived in 2019 with a career-best ranking of WTA World No.15 but carried the momentum of winning the WTA Elite Trophy in Wuhan into the new season, which she started with a bang as she reached the final of Sydney and the quarterfinals at the Australian Open.
From there, her level rarely dipped before her success in Shenzhen in November.
The first Australian WTA World No.1 since Evonne Goolagong Cawley in 1976, she finished the year with more match wins than any other player on Tour (56) and achieved this losing only 12 times. Moreover, she had success on all surfaces, finishing in the Top 10 on Tour for wins on hard courts, clay courts and grass courts over the course of 2019 and winning tournaments on each.
And this was despite having modest ambitions on clay.
After winning the French Open, she joked: “I said to my team, I was just worried about falling over. And I can successfully say that we got to the end of the clay court season and I did not fall over once!”
Her on-court statistics back up what a stellar year she enjoyed as she finished third in the ace count, posted the third best first service points won percentage and the best numbers in this regard on second serve.
As such, she was a comprehensive winner of the vote for this award, beating off fellow Grand Slam champions Bianca Andreescu, Simona Halep and Naomi Osaka, as well as former WTA World No.1 Karolina Pliskova, to claim the accolade.
