Iga Swiatek, the Queen of clay, finds her feet on grass with Bencic demolition

Times

10-07-2025

Iga Swiatek's movement on clay has long been an artform (James Gheerbrant writes). Videos often go viral which show, in glorious slow motion, her incredible knack for sliding on the red dirt, the way she can launch herself into these amazingly controlled movements of balletic balance and superhuman flexion. On grass, where for years she has struggled, the problem wasn't that she couldn't slide. As she explained this week, it was that when she did, she felt like she was never going to stop.
At last year's Wimbledon, she arrived as the top seed and world No1 and looked as helpless as ever on the lawns of the All England Club, losing to the unseeded Yulia Putintseva in the third round. Then she went to Paris for the Olympics and lost at Roland Garros, where she had previously been almost unbeatable, to Qinwen Zheng.
She began to fall down the rankings, from first to as low as eighth. In Miami in March, she lost to the world No120. She went 12 months without winning a tournament. Chris Evert said she'd lost her aura. Swiatek called this her 'worst season of the decade'. And in her private moments of doubt, she must have wondered if the slide would ever stop.
But if you've ever seen one of these videos, you'll know that the really cool thing about a Swiatek slide is how she gets out of it. The way that, just when you think she's about to crash into some poor ballboy, she puts on the brakes, splays her legs so deeply that her knees almost touch the ground, and in one fluid move turns her whole body through 180 degrees and segues into a sprint in the opposite direction. Never, though, has she executed a more spectacular volte-face than she has pulled off this fortnight.
At a low point in her career, on her least favourite surface, Swiatek now stands just one match from glory. She will take on Amanda Anisimova on Saturday, bidding to become only the eighth woman to win a grand-slam title on all three surfaces. In her press conference, she admitted that that goal had never even entered her thinking: she felt her grass-court game was so bad that it never even occurred to her as a possibility.
Reaching the final in Bad Homburg before this tournament, her first on grass, gave her belief: even though she lost to Jessica Pegula, she said, through tears: 'This shows there is hope for me on grass.' (Pegula replied, with some prescience, 'Trust me, you can play pretty good on grass.') Now, remarkably, Swiatek will go into her first Wimbledon final as a strong favourite, having demolished Belinda Bencic for the loss of just two games: the most one-sided grand-slam semi-final for eight years.
Swiatek broke in the second game, a heavy backhand into the corner setting up a simple putaway, and from then on the match was only going one way. She set the second set on the same course by breaking in the second game again, with a magnificent forehand return right onto the line. 'Today was just a different level from Iga,' Bencic said. 'She didn't let me in the match for one second.'
It was a measure of the quality of Swiatek's performance that the vanquished Bencic finished with 11 winners to just eight unforced errors: she played a decent match, but came up against Swiatek in that mode where there's nothing you can do against her. She's not the first: incredibly, this was the sixth time in Swiatek's career that she has won a grand-slam final, semi-final or quarter-final for the loss of three games or fewer.
Bencic, who gave birth to her daughter in April last year and began the year ranked 489th, has had a brilliant tournament, and will return to the top 20. There may yet be more grand-slam opportunities in her future. For Swiatek, one awaits which she never thought she'd have, in a place where she has finally found her feet.
Women's singles finalSaturday, 4pmTV BBC