Anastasia Potapova has spent the past two years going through more career and personal upheaval than most players face in a decade, changing the country she represents, marrying and divorcing a fellow professional tennis player within roughly ten months, cycling through four different coaches, and openly admitting to an entire season she essentially threw away chasing vacations over tennis.
She is a former junior world No. 1 and Wimbledon girls’ singles champion who has rebuilt her career more than once, most recently with a surprise semifinal run at the 2026 Madrid Open.
Anastasia Potapova Biography
She was born March 30, 2001, in Saratov, Russia, to Sergey Potapov and Yuliya Potapova. Anastasia Potapova is an only child and has credited that close-knit family dynamic for shaping her early focus and drive.
Her grandmother coached a regional basketball team in Russia, a detail Potapova has brought up herself when joking about her own competitiveness off the tennis court.
She won her first junior title at age nine in Volgograd. She began training at the Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow at age 12, later developing further at the Alexander Ostrovsky Academy in Khimki, one of Russia’s best-known tennis academies, balancing rigorous practice with homeschooling to accommodate her tournament schedule.
She played her first tour-level match at 15 in 2017, eight months after her junior Wimbledon title. She stands 1.75 meters tall and plays right-handed with a two-handed backhand.
She now represents Austria in competition over Russia, having switched her sporting nationality, and now resides in Vienna.
Career
Anastasia Potapova reached a career-high junior ranking of No. 1 in July 2016. She won the 2016 Wimbledon girls’ singles title that same year, one of the clearest early signals of her potential on the professional tour.
Potapova plays an aggressive, baseline-hugging game built around powerful groundstrokes and an extreme grip forehand that lets her generate heavy pace.
She has described her own approach to tennis and life in similarly all-or-nothing terms, saying that when she does anything, she gives it 100 percent, and if she can’t, she starts to feel there’s no point doing it at all.
Tennis.com described her playing personality as tennis’s answer to hyperpop, exaggerated swings paired with radical candor and electric charisma in interviews, a comparison that has stuck given how openly she discusses her own struggles compared to most tour professionals.
Career and Coaching History
Anastasia Potapova turned professional in 2016 and built her ranking steadily through both the ITF Circuit and the WTA Tour.
Her 2018 breakout season included a run to her first WTA final at the Moscow River Cup, where she lost to fellow teenager Olga Danilović, along with a final appearance at the Tashkent Open against Margarita Gasparyan.
Her coaching setup has changed repeatedly throughout her career, and she has been unusually candid about why. Early in her career, she worked with coach Iain Hughes, describing him afterward as someone who became like family during their time together, before the two mutually decided to part ways in 2021 after growing tired of being together constantly.
She moved to former ATP pro Igor Andreev, who had reached a career-high ranking of No. 18 in 2008 and a French Open quarterfinal in 2007.
Around that same period, following an ankle injury, Potapova has admitted she deliberately let her focus slip, telling Tennis.com that her lifestyle became more about vacations, restaurants, beaches and parties, with tennis itself becoming a low priority, adding that after years on tour it stopped feeling special for reasons she called stupid and a genuine mistake for a player her age.
She has said she has no regrets about that period despite the losses it cost her, framing it as something she needed to go through before recommitting to the sport.
She split from Andreev at the 2024 French Open and went without a coach entirely, a second such stretch after an earlier solo period.
She has described those moments of being alone as clarifying rather than purely difficult, telling Tennis.com that going without a team forces a player to take full responsibility for her own results with no one else to blame, and that during one coachless stretch she pushed herself to hit harder and take more risks specifically because she felt something was wrong with her tennis.
This shift helped her reach the second week of a Grand Slam for the first time. She worked briefly with a hitting partner, Martin Blasko, before moving to coach Dorian Descloix in 2025 and then to her current coach, Henner Nehles, later that year.
She has won three WTA singles titles, at the 2022 Istanbul Open, the 2023 Linz Open, and the 2025 Transylvania Open in Cluj-Napoca, where she defeated Lucia Bronzetti.
She has also won three WTA doubles titles, including a 2023 Linz doubles title alongside Veronika Kudermetova, and reached a career-high doubles ranking of No. 40 in December 2022.
Her strongest individual season came in 2023, when she reached the quarterfinals of the Miami Open by upsetting top seed Coco Gauff and Qinwen Zheng, along with semifinal runs at the Stuttgart Open and the Birmingham Classic.
Her career-high singles ranking is No. 21, achieved June 19, 2023, and as of May 2026 she is ranked No. 38 in singles. Her career prize money exceeds 6.4 million dollars.
Her best Grand Slam singles results include the third round of the Australian Open in both 2021 and 2026, the fourth round of the French Open in both 2024 and 2026, the third round of Wimbledon in 2023, and the third round of the US Open in 2024.
At the 2026 Madrid Open, she made a surprising run to the semifinals, a stretch that drew extra attention when courtside coaching moments involving her current partner, Dutch player Tallon Griekspoor, went viral among tennis fans.
Marriage
Potapova began dating fellow professional tennis player Alexander Shevchenko in 2022, the two quickly becoming one of the tour’s most visible couples.
Shevchenko proposed on September 24, 2023, and the two married on December 1, 2023, in a private ceremony attended by close friends and family.
At the time, both were enjoying career milestones; Potapova had just reached her career-high ranking of No. 21 that June, while Shevchenko had broken into the ATP’s top 100. The marriage lasted less than a year.
The two separated after the 2024 US Open, with fans first noticing signs of the split that September when Potapova deleted all photos of Shevchenko from her Instagram and unfollowed him.
Speaking to journalist Sofya Tartakova in early 2025, Potapova confirmed the divorce, saying she had made some big and difficult decisions at the end of the previous year and was disappointed things had gone the way they did.
In a separate interview, she said simply that the two had problems they were ultimately unable to resolve, while adding that she genuinely wished Shevchenko all the best.
Shevchenko has since changed his own competing nationality as well, switching from Russia to Kazakhstan in January 2024.
Current Relationship
Potapova has since moved on romantically, linked to Dutch ATP player Tallon Griekspoor starting in early 2025, after she was spotted supporting him at the Indian Wells Masters.
The relationship was further confirmed by vacation photos of the two together in the Maldives, and by early 2025 she had joked in an interview about not wanting to force a new relationship, saying she wanted to find someone who genuinely suited both her game and her personality.
Anastasia Potapova’s Net Worth
Anastasia Potapova’s net worth is estimated at $2 million. However, her documented career prize money alone exceeds $6.4 million as of 2026.
She has held sponsorship deals with Wilson and Nike throughout her career.
