Incredible Iga: 10 things Swiatek achieved by winning Roland Garros this year

From winning streaks to finals streaks and a prize money milestone, Iga Swiatek just kept piling on the numbers with her latest triumph at Roland Garros.

Here are 10 things the 2020 and 2022 champion achieved in Paris this year:

She extended her winning streak to 35 matches in a row. She’s the second woman since 2000 to win 35 matches in a row, alongside Venus Williams in 2000, and just the eighth woman in the entire Open Era to achieve the feat, after Margaret Court, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, Martina Hingis and Venus.

She’s won her last 6 tournaments in a row, too. And they’ve all been big: Doha (WTA 1000), Indian Wells (WTA 1000), Miami (WTA 1000), Stuttgart (WTA 500), Rome (WTA 1000) and Roland Garros (Grand Slam). She’s just the third woman since 2000 to win six WTA events in a row, joining Venus in 2000 and Justine Henin in 2007-2008.

She’s now won her last 9 finals in a row—in straight sets. Since losing her very first WTA final as a No. 115-ranked 17-year-old in Lugano, Switzerland in 2019, Swiatek has been on fire in finals, not even losing more than four games in any set: 6-4, 6-1; 6-2, 6-2; 6-0, 6-0; 6-2, 6-0; 6-4, 6-1; 6-4, 6-0; 6-2, 6-2; 6-2, 6-2; and most recently her 6-1, 6-3 championship victory over Coco Gauff in Paris on Saturday.

She’s won her last 13 matches in a row against Top 20 players. Those 13 wins have all come within the 35-match winning streak since February and include seven Top 10 wins (three against Aryna Sabalenka, two against Maria Sakkari and one each against Anett Kontaveit and Ons Jabeur) and two more Top 20 wins at Roland Garros (Jessica Pegula in the quarterfinals and Daria Kasatkina in the semifinals).

She’s now won 56 of the last 58 sets she’s played. Since dropping the first set of her 4-6, 6-2, 6-3 win over Angelique Kerber in the fourth round of Indian Wells, Swiatek is 56-2 in sets, only losing a pair of first-set tie-breaks to Liudmila Samsonova in the semifinals of Stuttgart (6-7 (4), 6-4, 7-5) and to Zheng Qinwen in the fourth round of Roland Garros (6-7 (5), 6-0, 6-2). She was up in both of those sets, too.

She’s just the 10th woman in the Open Era to win multiple Roland Garros titles. She joins Court, Evert, Navratilova, Graf, Seles, Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario, Henin, Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova. The 21-year-old Swiatek is the fourth-youngest of the group to become a multiple Roland Garros champion, trailing only Seles (who won her second Roland Garros title at age 17), Graf (who did it at 18) and Evert (at 20).

She’s also the first player born in the 2000s, male or female, to win multiple majors.

She won the first major she played as world No. 1. In a sport full of pressure, things can change once a player gets to No. 1—but it doesn’t seem like that for Swiatek. She’s now 18-0 since rising to No. 1 on April 4th, and she’s the first woman to win the first major she’s played as No. 1 since Henin at the 2004 Australian Open.

She was just the fifth women’s No. 1 seed to win Roland Garros in the last 25 years. Since 1997, the only favorites to make it all the way to the title have been Henin (2007), Serena (2013 and 2015), Simona Halep (2018) and now Swiatek (2022).

Roland Garros has been particularly difficult for top women’s seeds lately—in 10 of the last 19 years they haven’t even made it past the fourth round.

She surpassed $10 million in career prize money—$9 million and $11 million too, actually. She went to Paris with $8.9 million and left with $11.3 million. She’s won more than half of her career prize money this year alone ($6.4 million of it, or 57%). She rose from No. 64 to No. 49 on the WTA’s all-time career prize money list this week.

She now has more ranking points than No. 2 and No. 3 on the WTA rankings combined. Swiatek’s lead at the top of the rankings is growing so out of control now that it would take all of No. 2 Kontaveit and No. 3 Paula Badosa’s points plus at least another 60 points to pass her—the Pole also doubled her lead over No. 2 this week from 2,150 points going into Roland Garros to 4,305 points now.