It is tough to stop Iga Swiatek when she wins the opening set. On clay, the challenge becomes bigger. The 22-year-old Pole has a 53-1 win-loss record (excluding retirements) on the surface at WTA events after taking the first set. That defeat came against Czech Republic’s Karolina Muchova back in 2019 in Prague when she was a teenager.
Swiatek has now been at the top of the WTA rankings for more than a year and has accumulated two French Open (2020, 2022) and one US Open (2022) titles in her fledgling career. On Sunday, going for her third title at Roland-Garros, she faced who else but Muchova in the final on Court Philippe Chatrier.
As expected, she grabbed the opening set 6-2 and also got the early break of serve to lead 3-0 in the second. However, her unseeded Czech opponent bounced back to win 7-5 to take the final to a decider.
Prague flashback? Could Muchova, who was told by the doctors “not to do sport anymore”, pull it off again?
It certainly looked like happening again. World No. 43 Muchova had stunned Maria Sakkari in the first round and stole a spot in the summit clash from World No. 2 and reigning Australian Open champion Aryna Sabalenka from match-point down to beat her 7-6(5), 6-7(5), 7-5 in an epic semifinal.
The advantage the Czech has is that her playing style of using a lot of backhand slices, drop shots, rushing to the net and finishing the points with deft volleys is not that common any more. More often than not, it disrupts the rhythm of her opponents.
In a memorable final for the Parisian crowd, Muchova looked set to do it to Swiatek as well as she broke her twice, only to drop her own serve soon in the third set.
The 26-year-old earned another chance to move ahead with a break point at 40-30 in the ninth game but this was as close as she could get as Swiatek won seven of the next eight points with the title-clinching one coming off a Muchova double fault.
Bagels to battles
From dishing out four bagels (6-0 sets) in her first four rounds to facing a spirited Brazilian in Beatriz Haddad Maia in the semifinals and finally coming up against Muchova, the path to glory was a roller-coaster ride for the Pole.
Swiatek had not faced such pressure in her previous three Grand Slam finals. Clay has been her most dominant surface but on Saturday, she looked vulnerable as a loss was a mere five points away. But when Muchova hit the net with her second serve, the Pole was completely overwhelmed. She dropped her racquet, crouched and broke into tears with her hands hiding her face. She rushed to the player’s box to hug her father Tomasz and sister Agata.
While her first title in 2020 came out of the blue as an unseeded player, her second in 2022 helped quash any doubts about her status as the deserving new World No. 1 after the retirement of Ash Barty. Her third, and the most recent one, may prove to be the beginning of Swiatek, the player who can also battle it out till the end even if things aren’t going her way in the middle.
Swiatek lifting the Suzanne Lenglen Cup, with the lid coming off as she celebrated on the dais at the trophy presentation, could be a sight one witnesses many times in the years to come.
“I was a little bit surprised that it actually happened. [Muchova] was always coming back. So I felt like — I don’t know, I don’t know what I felt,” Swiatek admitted after the win.
“It’s pretty hard to kind of keep your focus for these almost three weeks. I finished the whole clay court swing so well, and that I kind of survived. I guess I’m never going to doubt my strength again maybe because of that.”
Records
The Pole also set several records with her third French Open crown. She became the first woman to win consecutive titles in Paris since Belgium’s Justine Henin performed a hat-trick (2005-07).
After Monica Seles and Naomi Osaka, Swiatek is just the third woman in the Open era to win each of her first four Grand Slam finals.
She is also the youngest woman to claim back-to-back French Open titles since Seles in the early 1990s, and the youngest to win four Grand Slams since Serena Williams.
Going forward
2023 has shown that putting the last season behind them the other players are ready to challenge Swiatek. In fact, Sabalenka was on course to become the new World No. 1 till her heart-breaking loss to Muchova in Paris and Swiatek reaching the final the same day.
Elena Rybakina, Haddad Maia and Barbora Krejcikova have tested the 22-year-old in the first half this year, something that bodes well for women’s tennis in the long run.
Another challenge that awaits Swiatek is the grasscourt season. On Instagram, at the end of last season, she posted a video recreating ‘The Lion King’ in which she implied that she is yet to conquer the greens.
She has never gone past the fourth round at Wimbledon and does not have a singles Tour-level title on grass. It remains to be seen how she modifies her game to adjust to the surface in order to extend her dominance over the rest of the field.
