Alina Korneeva

Born in Moscow on June 23, 2007, Alina Korneeva is the daughter of an Olympic athlete — her father, Aleksandr Korneev, won a bronze medal as a volleyball player at the 2008 Summer Olympics. She came up through Spartak Moscow and started on the ITF circuit in 2021 at 14, racking up six junior singles titles in 2022, the most of any girl that year. The "mini Sharapova" tag followed early — a right-hander built around first-strike aggression and the kind of competitive streak that, by her own telling, thrives in three-hour grinds and hostile crowds.

Then came 2023, the season that made her name. Korneeva won the girls' singles titles at both the Australian Open — beating compatriot Mirra Andreeva in the final — and the French Open, becoming the first player since Magdalena Maleeva in 1990 to take the year's first two junior majors. That run carried her to world No. 1 in the ITF junior combined ranking. She translated it immediately, becoming the youngest player ever to win a W100 title in Figueira da Foz and reaching the Hong Kong third round on her WTA debut.

The pro arc since has been a story of stalled momentum. She qualified for the Australian Open main draw in 2024 and reached the second round, climbing to a then-career-high No. 128 — but her momentum was halted by injury: wrist surgery sidelined her for seven months in 2024, and she missed another six months in the first half of 2025.

She's now rebuilt the ranking the hard way. In February 2026 she won her first WTA 125 title at the Oeiras Indoors, then qualified for Roland-Garros, where she beat Italy's Elisabetta Cocciaretto in the first round before losing to compatriot Anna Kalinskaya. That result pushed her to a top-100 debut at No. 95 on June 8, 2026.