Sonay Kartal becomes British number one after Wuhan Open final run
Sonay Kartal became the British number one for the first time on Monday after reaching the final of the Wuhan Open, a WTA 1,000 event. The 24-year-old produced that result in just her third tournament back from injury.
Six months earlier Kartal was immobilised by a stress fracture in her back and said she could not stand up or brush her teeth without "being in agony"; she described the early recovery as slow. "In the first month or so, I was at home in bed - sometimes I had good days but there were also bad days where I wasn't really able to walk without some form of pain," Kartal said. She did not return to competitive action until little under a month ago and had been ranked 54th in the world when the back problem began at Indian Wells in March, using a protected ranking to enter Wuhan.
At the Wuhan Open Kartal advanced to the biggest final of her career, beating a sequence of opponents that included current top-10 players and former Grand Slam champions before losing to this year's French Open runner-up Maja Chwalinska. Kartal was a set and a break up in the final before falling to what the report described as a brutal defeat against the 22nd-ranked Chwalinska.
Her runner-up finish awarded 650 ranking points, moving Kartal back above her previous position and putting her close to her career-high of 44th, which she reached in July 2025 after making the last 16 at Wimbledon. She achieved that rise just 10 matches into her comeback.
Kartal's team said she "worked her socks off, 9-5 all the time" while rehabilitating the injury, and she paid direct tribute to her support staff after collecting the runners-up trophy. "If it wasn't for them I wouldn't be here," Kartal said, naming coach Ben Reeves, fitness coach Ian Aylward and physio Dani Gillanders. "It makes it even better that the three people who helped me get back to fitness and fixed my back are with me. It's been a special week for all of us."
Her return provides a rare deep run for British women's tennis in 2026: Kartal had been absent from three of the four majors and, with her out, no British women went past the second round of a Grand Slam tournament this year. Kartal has twice gone beyond the second round in her career, reaching the third round at Wimbledon in 2024 and "going one stage further last year," and her Wuhan final made her the first British player to reach a WTA 1000 final since Johanna Konta in 2019 and the best British result since Emma Raducanu won the US Open in 2021, alongside Arthur Fery's run to the Wimbledon semi-finals in the summer.
Regaining her ranking so quickly will have implications for the 2027 season, since Kartal will no longer need to use a protected ranking to enter tournaments including the Australian Open, giving her greater choice over when and where to play as she manages her workload. "My goal on the Asian swing was just to try to defend those points I had from last year and make the use of the protected ranking worthwhile," said Kartal, who also won two matches at the China Open in Beijing. "I think I've gone above and beyond that. The goal has been achieved this week and I'm in a good spot for the rest of the year and next year."