Halep celebrates long journey to No. 1

In the span of three months, three different WTA players have claimed the No.1 ranking: Garbine Muguruza, Karolina Pliskova, and Simona Halep. Only one have them has a major trophy to her name.

Some will always decry a system that empirically anoints a player as currently the “best,” even if that player’s resume tells a different story. But in a year when Serena Williams has been largely absent, a revolving door of top players in the No.1 spot does seem just about right.

For Halep, the No. 1 ranking seems an especially worthy crowning of a remarkable run going back to 2014, when she first finished the year ranked inside the Top 5 and has remained ever since. She's the first-ever Romanian to top the WTA rankings.

Here are some of the moments that marked her long, strange journey to the top of the rankings:

Halep’s losses have arguably defined her 2017 season more than her wins have, and none more so than her quarterfinal loss to Johanna Konta at the Miami Open.

Early in the season, Halep was struggling. Early exits at the Australian Open and Indian Wells made her match with Konta seem that much more important in shaping the rest of her season.

Halep took the first set 6-3 and served for the match at 5-4 when she suddenly found herself headed to a third set after dropping the second set tiebreak. That she was unable to overcome her disappointment and lost the third set 6-2 wasn’t the headline. It was that her coach, Darren Cahill, split with her after what he perceived to be a lack of competitiveness from his charge.

To Halep’s credit she took it as a wake-up call, and turned her mental headspace around while winning her coach back.

As arguably the fittest player on the tour and a dogged defender, some of Halep’s best career results have come on clay, including her lone tournament win of 2017 in Madrid.

In her second-ever French Open Final, she faced the Latvian teenager Jelena Ostapenko as a heavy favorite and built a 6-4, 3-0 lead. She would win only four more games in the stunning loss.

Even with her renewed commitment to positivity, it was a crushing defeat for Halep. The limits of her game had been exposed by a teenager who, with nothing to lose, simply overpowered her heavy groundstrokes and relentless aggression.

But once again, Halep would put the stinging defeat behind her in fairly quick fashion, recently revealing that Kim Clijsters helped her put the defeat into perspective.

Konta and Halep met again—this time in the quarterfinals of Wimbledon. Konta prevailed in a dramatic three sets to reach her first Wimbledon semifinals, but Halep had little to hang her head about. Even though it was another lost chance at No. 1, it was arguably the match of the year.

For reasons that had little to do with her, Halep found herself front and center of a charged atmosphere, this time on Opening Night of the US Open. Her first round opponent? Wild card Maria Sharapova, returning to her first major since her 2016 ban for a positive doping test.  Halep needed to overcome a 0-6 head-to-head record against the Russian.

Much like her Wimbledon encounter with Konta, Halep fought tooth-and-nail before succumbing 6-4, 4-6, 6-3 under the lights on Arthur Ashe. Once again, she had come up a little short.

Halep would have her revenge on Sharapova a month later at the China Open, winning 6-2, 6-2 in a tour de force that proved to be her match of the season. She would go on to lose the final to a red hot Caroline Garcia 6-4, 7-6, but beating Sharapova for the first time—and emphatically, at that—felt like a turning point for Halep. The solid week was enough to earn her the No. 1 spot, finally.

Can Halep take another step at the WTA Finals in Singapore? If she can, she could do what no other No. 1 has done this year: Hang on to the top spot for a little while.