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Dayana Yastremska made headlines Tuesday by completing one of the biggest upsets at Wimbledon with her first-round victory in straight sets over No. 2 seed Coco Gauff.
But the unseeded Ukrainian tennis player isn’t a complete unknown.
The 25-year-old is ranked No. 42 in the world and has three WTA singles titles to her name, while having her best finish in a major at the 2024 Australian Open when she reached the semifinals.
But Tuesday’s victory was by far the biggest of her career and is sure to add an extra buzz around Yastremska.
Yastremska already has an interesting backstory due to her apparent allergy to grass — the same surface she’s playing on at Wimbledon.
Yastremska, who celebrated her 25th birthday in May, detailed her allergy after she reached the final at the Nottingham Open earlier this month, saying at the time that “I really love playing on grass, even though I think I have a bit of an allergy to grass!”
She already had quite the following on social media with 217,000 followers on Instagram, where she’s posted content around her tennis career and stylish shots from parties and modeling.
“I like modeling, I like fashion, I like philosophy, and I like many things to do,” she’s quoted as saying in a 2024 Tennis.com article. “But I don’t have much time for it.”
And her talents extend beyond the court as Yastremska showed off her singing chops during the COVID-19 pandemic and released two singles during the summer of 2020 titled “Thousands of Me” and “Favourite Track.”
“I do not strive to become a cool artist,” she wrote in a post on Instagram in 2020. “I just like to sing, I like this whole atmosphere. It’s much easier for me on the tennis court, than being in the studio, standing near the microphone, and singing, it’s such a stress for me!”
Yastremska paused her musical ambitions in 2021 during a provisional doping ban following a positive test for a prohibited substance, but she was cleared six months later after an independent tribunal ruled that the positive result was due to contamination of the test sample.
She was also forced to flee her home in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, revealing in a social media post that after two nights in an underground parking garage, her parents decided to send her and her sister out of the country.
In February 2024, Yastremska released a new single, “Hearts,” which she described as a “song for Ukraine.”
Yastremska will face Anastasia Zakharova in the second round of Wimbledon.
