Sorana Cîrstea

Biography

Sorana Cirstea was born on April 7, 1990 in Bucharest, Romania. She plays right-handed with a two-handed backhand, and stands 176 centimeters tall. She first picked up a racquet at the age of four and played her first ITF tournaments in 2004. In junior tennis, Cirstea quickly established herself among the strongest Romanian players of her generation: in 2003 she rose to number one in the world rankings among players under 14, and in 2006 she reached sixth place in the ITF junior world rankings. In 2005 she won the Category 1 German Junior Open, and in 2006 she reached the final of the prestigious Trofeo Bonfiglio tournament, where she lost to fellow Romanian Ioana Raluca Olaru. In the semifinal of that event, Cirstea defeated world junior number one Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova. In 2007 she also played in the junior doubles final at Roland Garros. Cirstea made her professional tour debut in the main draw of the WTA tournament in Stockholm in 2006, and made her Grand Slam debut at the 2008 Australian Open. That same season she won her first WTA title in Tashkent, defeating Sabine Lisicki in the final, while a year earlier she had reached her first WTA final in Budapest. The best stretch of her early career came in the 2013 season: in Toronto, Cirstea defeated Caroline Wozniacki, Petra Kvitova and Li Na before losing to Serena Williams in the final. That result brought her a career-high ranking of world number 21 on August 21, 2013. Her best Grand Slam result is a quarterfinal appearance at the 2009 Roland Garros. In 2016 the Romanian returned from a shoulder injury and improved her ranking by 163 places over the course of the season. In 2021 she won her second WTA singles title in Istanbul, ending a gap of almost thirteen years between titles at this level. In 2023 Cirstea reached the quarterfinals of Indian Wells, the semifinals of Miami and the quarterfinals of the US Open for the first time. In 2025 she won the tournament in Cleveland, as well as the biggest doubles title of her career at the WTA 1000 event in Madrid alongside Anna Kalinskaya. In 2026 Cirstea added a singles victory in Cluj-Napoca and a doubles title in Linz alongside Zhang Shuai. In total, her résumé includes four singles and seven doubles WTA titles, one singles final at a WTA 1000 tournament, as well as eight singles and nine doubles ITF titles. In December 2025, Cirstea announced that the 2026 season would be the last of her professional career.

Recent matches