The best of Britain Emma Raducanu was routed from the US Open at the hands of former Wimbledon champion.

With fashion magnate Anna Wintour watching on from her box, Raducanu had won her first two matches for the loss of only six games, but here she was on the receiving end as Rybakina powered to a 6-1 6-2 victory in just 62 minutes.

The British star has played some excellent tennis at the Grand Slams this season but has never gone beyond the third round, stopped by Iga Swiatek in Melbourne and Paris, by Aryna Sabalenka at Wimbledon and here in New York by No 9 seed Rybakina.

This was by a distance her worst performance of an otherwise excellent hard-court season.

Now, Raducanu has now played a dozen matches against the big four of women’s tennis (the three above mentioned plus Coco Gauff) and has won only a single set.

The matchup against Rybakina looks especially bad, their only previous meeting being a 6-0, 6-1 victory for the Kazakh in Sydney, 2022.

In Raducanu’s first match against a top-10 player at the US Open, her challenge was to make the match about athleticism, rather than power hitting.

If she could get Rybakina on the run, she had a chance. But the purity of Rybakina’s ballstriking denied Raducanu any route into the rallies.