The ruthlessness of tennis’ world No.1 Iga Swiatek

By her own admission, Iga Swiatek, the 23-year-old sensation from Poland, can be in the midst of demolishing an opponent and not have the faintest clue how dominant she looks. It’s a level of obliviousness that’s hard to maintain while running around the clay of Philippe-Chatrier Court. But it’s also why she happens to be a clear favourite to win her third consecutive French Open.

As it turns out, there is no force in modern tennis quite as powerful as Iga Swiatek in the zone.

“I’m keeping myself busy in terms of thinking about technique and tactics and what I would do with the next point,” she said this week. “Because of that, I don’t really allow myself time to drift off and think about other stuff.”

Swiatek may not always know the score, but her opponents definitely do—usually because they’re getting dismantled. The latest player to join her list of victims on Thursday was American Coco Gauff, who will become the world’s No. 2-ranked player next week. She went down 2-6, 4-6 in just 1 hour and 37 minutes as Swiatek punched her ticket to a fifth major final. Swiatek will now face Italy’s Jasmine Paolini, a first-time Grand Slam finalist, on Saturday.

“As always, she played at a tough level,” said Gauff, who has now lost 11 of her 12 matches against Swiatek. “She’s a tough matchup for me, obviously. I think the numbers answer that question.”

Yet that somehow counted as one of Swiatek’s more gentle performances at this French Open. The two-time defending champion has steamrolled through the second week, extending her run to 20 consecutive victories at Roland-Garros.

Along the way, Swiatek has managed to win three of her past six sets 6-0—and taught French crowds what a real bagel looks like in the process. The player who has turned winning sets 6-0 into her signature gave her most brutal demonstration in the fourth round. She dismissed Anastasia Potapova 6-0, 6-0 in just 40 minutes, making it the quickest match of her professional career. The ball was in play for all 6 minutes and 58 seconds and Swiatek never flinched.

The only time her focus seemed to slip during this French Open was during the second set of her second-round match against Naomi Osaka. Inside a rowdy Philippe-Chatrier, the power and depth of Osaka’s groundstrokes knocked her off balance in a way that Swiatek tends not to cope with comfortably. (It’s no coincidence that one of the few players who consistently gives her trouble is the heavy-hitting hard-court specialist Elena Rybakina.)

And so, for around 30 minutes, Swiatek was on the ropes. She screamed out her frustration and berated herself in Polish as she lost the set 1-6. But Swiatek, who has worked closely with a sports psychologist since first emerging on tour, recovered just in time to save match point in the third and come back from 2-5 down.

Swiatek wouldn’t let anyone get that close to knocking her out again. Since facing Osaka, she has dropped just 14 games in four matches. Though the scorelines paint Swiatek as a killer meting out punishment on her rivals, her own account of those 6-0 sets is far more practical. Once she takes hold of a set, she’s merely trying to remain in her flow state.

“You just go with it, because there’s no point of, like, changing anything,” Swiatek said. “You just continue what you’ve been doing and what has been working.”

Because clay-court tennis tends to breed specialists, the French Open has always lent itself to streaks of dominance—just ask 14-time champion Rafael Nadal. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that two other women—Justine Henin and Maria Sharapova—have reached three finals in a row in the 21st century.

Where Swiatek sets herself apart is that her moments of untouchability can extend across surfaces. Back in 2022, she put together the longest streak that women’s tennis has seen this century by winning 37 straight matches across six tournaments, a run that included the Miami Open and her title here in 2022.

Even her rivals are blown away by what a locked-in Swiatek is capable of. Aryna Sabalenka, who came to Paris as world No. 2, said that she watched her double-bagel against Potapova and could hardly believe what she was seeing—even if Swiatek had already posted roughly two dozen 6-0 sets in Grand Slam tournaments before.

“I was like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s just another level, that’s so intense,’” Sabalenka said before losing in the quarterfinals on Wednesday. “That’s just her world, these bagels. This is something about Iga.”

-- The Wall Street Journal