“In June 2018, Lena turned 19 and was ranked near the bottom of the world's top 200—far behind her peers Anna Blinkova, Sofya Zhuk, and Anna Kalinskaya (Lyudmila Samsonova was competing for Italy at the time), not to mention Daria Kasatkina, Veronika Kudermetova, and Natalia Vikhlyantseva, who were a couple of years older, or established stars like Maria Sharapova, Svetlana Kuznetsova, Ekaterina Makarova, Elena Vesnina, Vera Zvonareva, and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova.
Clearly, in such company, Lena could not expect much favor from the Russian Tennis Federation. Consequently, her father, Andrei Rybakin—an NTV-Plus TV producer originally from Almaty—approached the leadership of the Kazakhstan Tennis Federation with a proposal to take his daughter under their wing. The Federation agreed—and, as we can see now, they made the right choice!”
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