Kamilla Rakhimova About

Rakhimova's qualifier ladder and the Paolini scalp that flew an Uzbek flag

Kamilla Rakhimova is a baseline grinder who built her game from the floor of the sport. She made her professional debut on the ITF Circuit in Kazakhstan in 2016, and the years that followed were a stack of small-tournament titles — ten Challenger/ITF titles, nine of them on hard — before the Tour stuck. Born 28 August 2001 in Yekaterinburg, she is a Russian-born player of Volga Tatar and Bashkir descent; her mother is from Uzbekistan and was a youth tennis player for the Uzbek SSR. On 28 November 2025, it was announced that Rakhimova had changed her sporting nationality from Russia to Uzbekistan.

The game is weight off the ground. A right-hander, she's a grinder who lives in long exchanges rather than ending points cheaply — she manages only about 0.17 aces per game and earns few free points on serve. The compensation is grit on the big points: she defends break points at a 57% save rate, wins roughly 64.5% of first-serve points, and holds in about 65.8% of her service games. The return, where rallies start, is the lever she leans on most.

The ranking has caught up in stages. A 2022 semifinal run at Bogota, where she beat Beatriz Haddad Maia en route, pushed her into the top 100 for the first time at No. 96. Her best major result came at the US Open, where she entered as a lucky loser, beat Kristina Mladenovic and Ekaterina Alexandrova to reach a Grand Slam third round for the first time, then lost to Barbora Krejcikova. Her career-high singles ranking of No. 60 came on 30 December 2024.

Grass produced the signature beat. As a qualifier she reached the Eastbourne quarterfinals, then made the Wimbledon third round for the first time with wins over Aoi Ito and fourth seed Jasmine Paolini — her first top-10 win — before losing to Linda Noskova. She closed that season with a WTA 125 title at Angers. Now ranked 78 and competing under the Uzbek flag, she remains exactly what she's always been: a qualifier-grade competitor who makes seeds work for every game.

Kamilla Rakhimova at a glance

Kamilla Rakhimova is 25 years old; was born in Yekaterinburg, Russia; stands 1.7 m; and is ranked No. 76 in the WTA rankings.