Elena-Gabriela Ruse is a Romanian professional tennis player who was born on November 6, 1997, in Bucharest, Romania. After starting to play early on in her childhood, the Romanian stuck at it until the junior age groups. It was clear she had found her calling, with her winning numerous junior titles.
Keen to translate this success onto the professional WTA Tour, she was soon gifted her tour debut at the home tournament in Bucharest. It was the 2015 doubles event, which she entered with partner Jaqueline Cristian. In fact, at this same tournament, Ruse made her long-awaited singles debut.
She had to wait until 2016 for it, with her first-round match-up against the seventh seed Anastasija Sevastova proving too tough to overcome. Spending the next two years building strong foundations on the ITF Tour, she occasionally dabbled at the WTA events she could enter, which little by little helped her up to the level.
Testament to her improvement was her 2018 Grand Slam debut at Wimbledon, when she came through three tough qualifying rounds to play Agnieszka Radwanska in the first round, a match she lost. Still active on the doubles side of the game, she and her compatriot Cristian reached her first final at the WTA level at their beloved Bucharest Open in 2019, ultimately being defeated by Viktoria Kuzmova and Kristyna Pliskova.
She used these successes to motivate her to go further, and it was not long before she was bettering that result in singles. Her maiden WTA title came at the 2021 Hamburg Open when she overcame Andrea Petkovic in the final.
Proving that it was not a fluke, she went on to reach another singles final that season in Palermo before getting through to the US Open doubles quarter-finals. 2022 was when she completed the set of having played in the main draw at all Grand Slams, with her coming on the brink of breaking into the world's Top 50.
Just a year later, a Slam semifinal was on the cards for the first time in her career. It came in the doubles event at the Australian Open, with her and partner Marta Kostyuk only falling to eventual tournament winners Barbora Krejcikova and Katerina Siniakova.
