Iga Swiatek: Great with a capital “G”

Iga Swiatek has never sparked the sort of hype lavished on some of her peers and rivals. That may have something with being from Poland, a nation that lacks the tennis cache of, say, the Czech Republic or the exotic appeal of, say, Tunisia. Or it may be because Swiatek’s game is so well integrated that it can lull the eye. Or perhaps it owes to her bearing, which is anything but intimidating. Maybe it would be different if she didn’t seem so cerebral, so indifferent to transactional operations with the media.

Yet here we are: the Warsaw-born 22-year-old is on the cusp of becoming one of the towering Grand Slam champions of the present era while flying well under the radar—no mean feat, under the circumstances. You don’t have to take my word for it. On a Tennis Channel broadcast the other day, truth-teller Andy Roddick said, “Iga has become more bankable over the course of her career. As good as we all know she is, her career at this point is almost undersold. . . she’s approaching the rare air: [Justine] Henin, [Maria] Sharapova, Lindsay [Davenport], [Kim] Clijsters. She (Swiatek) is a bad woman, man.”

Bad, of course, meaning good. As in Hall-of-Fame-worthy excellent.

Swiatek has already punched her ticket into that institution. She has accumulated four Grand Slam titles, three at Roland Garros. She has bagged eight WTA 1000 titles and been year-end No. 1 twice since cracking the Top 20 for the first time just four years ago. Swiatek’s record in WTA Finals is 9-3, and she’s quickly closing on 100 weeks spent ranked on top. Oh, and she’s 31-8 against Top 10 opponents since 2020.

Impressive as the stats are, they only tell half the Swiatek story. The other half isn’t driven by data but by biography—and Swiatek’s extraordinary resilience.

Swiatek was gobsmacked, like the rest of tennis, when top-ranked Ash Barty won the 2022 Australian Open and abruptly announced her retirement (just weeks earlier, Barty had throttled Swiatek in the Adelaide tournament). With only one Grand Slam champion in the Top 10 at the time, Garbine Muguruza, the game appeared to be in the hands of Aryna Sabalenka, already a convincing No. 2.

Swiatek, who was just 20 at the time, was ranked No. 9. Nobody could have predicted the tear she would go on starting barely a month later in Doha. The outcome was a 37-match winning streak (longest of the new millennium) that left Swiatek’s flag planted atop the WTA mountain.

“Oh, well, I remember everything, honestly,” Swiatek said of that remarkable period after the recent Indian Wells final, referring to all the attention and pressure visited upon her during the run. “It was pretty crazy. I'm pretty proud of the way I adapted to all these challenges that I had to face. First becoming world No. 1, then actually feeling comfortable with it, and using it on court [while] being the target of many players that wanted to beat—particularly, me.”

Swiatek’s rise was so authoritative that it put the kibosh on any potential suggestion that the WTA No. 1 had arrived at her distinction by default. Swiatek hasn’t yielded any ground since 2020. If anything, she has improved in every dimension of her game. Most striking, she avoided the common pitfall of clinging to a game that has yielded a significant measure of success. Among other things, she has vastly improved her serve.

“I [once] was the kind of player that just pushed the ball into the court to start the rally or something,” Swiatek said. “But now I feel like I can do more with my serve. I'm trying to make proper decisions.”

Swiatek fired a particularly devastating sequence of serves at Maria Sakkari in one critical game of their Indian Wells final. Invited to revel in the memory, Swiatek’s first reaction was, “Well, remember there were also new balls [in that game]. So maybe it was also about that.”

There isn’t any false modesty about Swiatek. Such comments just point to her instinct toward analysis, a tendency that is manifest in her relationship with psychologist Daria Abramowicz. The adviser is part of Swiaek’s traveling team and plays a larger role in her career than similar “mental” coaches do for other pros. Abramowicz has helped Swiatek attain a striking degree of clarity and openness about the pressures and struggles presented by her status.

Any professional player can attest that thinking sometimes is not all it’s cracked to be. In the heat of competition, thoughts can bust down your mental door and allow the evil trolls of doubt to march into your consciousness like a tiny but loud brass band. And the next thing you know, that 6-3, 5-1 lead is gone, and you’re out of the tournament.

This is a topic that sometimes makes players uncomfortable, reluctant to delve into sensitive areas that touch on issues of confidence, courage (or the lack thereof), even self-esteem. Swiatek, though, has come to embrace the idea that sunlight is the best disinfectant. When she was asked by a reporter why it’s so difficult for players to focus on the “process” of competition rather than “outcome,” she didn’t miss a beat.

“You can't control your thoughts usually, you know?” she explained. “They will come. The question is, ‘How are you going to handle them?’ And ‘What are you going to do with them?’ But usually, when you don't want to think about something it's going to start popping in your head anyway.”

This kind of clarity makes it easier to understand how Swiatek has been able to bear up under the stress that accompanied her rise to the top—and her determination to stay there, the target large on her back.

I admit to having been somewhat puzzled when Swiatek first appeared on the scene and caught the eye of the pundit class. Sure, her spidery athleticism was obvious, but that conventional-looking game, while solid, didn’t seem to be anything more than that. Besides, in roughly that time frame we had witnessed a remarkable succession of intriguing emergences: Marketa Vondrousova, Sofia Kenin, Barbora Krejcikova, Dayana Yastremska, Amanda Anisimova, Karolina Muchova. . . Most of them were, or have become, very good—but not great.

Swiatek has become great, with an upper-case “G.”