Iga Swiatek's Wimbledon and her tennis journey toward being her new, old self

New York Times

9 hours ago

THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, LONDON — There is a mysterious storm brewing in the bottom half of the women's draw at Wimbledon. At its center is a player that much of the field is trying to figure out, as she too tries to figure it out who she is on this grass.
It's not a surprise qualifier, or a player who has directly benefited from so many seeds making an early exit.
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It's Iga Świątek, the five-time Grand Slam champion who spent 125 weeks as the world No. 1 between early 2022 and late 2024. She's the No. 8 seed at Wimbledon, but she's actually the world No. 4. Only three of the top seven players in the world are left in the draw.
That version of Świątek can appear on the Wimbledon grass, but to make it happen, she will have to win a battle between her two tennis selves that she has been conducting since late last year.
Świątek won the girls' singles title at the All England Club in 2018. Two years later, she won her first Grand Slam at the French Open. Two years after that, she won the 2022 U.S. Open, as well as the first of three consecutive French Opens.
But she also hasn't won a tournament since she won the last of those three, 13 months ago. She has only been to the second week of Wimbledon twice in five tries. But going off her first two matches here so far and her run to the finals at a warm-up event in Bad Homburg, Germany, Świątek has shown signs that she might be getting inside the tennis time machine she has been building the past few months. She is going back toward the player she was when she won the junior title here, the player she was during her ensuing climb to the top of the game.
That player floated up and down and all across court with an a preternatural ease that veterans long for. She played with variety and spin, and happily worked her way through points instead of taking the biggest swing she could at first chance. She won points with cute angles and deft stop volleys. And when swinging hard wasn't working, her fallback plan was something other than swinging even harder.
That became eminently clear Thursday, after Świątek dropped the opening set to Caty McNally, an American qualifier and the world No. 125, on Centre Court. She ran away with the next two and the match, 5-7, 6-2, 6-1. She didn't do that by landing more first-strike bullets an inch in rather than a foot wide. She did it by firing fewer bullets.
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Her first serve slowed down. When she was returning, she focused more on putting the ball back in play, often with a chip, rather than trying to crush it across the the court. During the first set she won just 12 of 25 points that stretched longer than four shots. During the next two sets she won 25 of 40. The same pattern occurred in her first match against Polina Kudermetova, when she won just five of 18 points longer than four shots during a tight first set, and seven of eight in the second. Her first serve slowed down slightly but became more effective in that match, too.
Perhaps more importantly, she had played that way to go 4-1 up against McNally in the set that she lost. Then she did what she has done in her worst losses in recent times: she reverted to the all-out aggressiveness that became ingrained in her tennis between 2022 and 2024. It made her the dominant player in the world and won her Grand Slam titles. It also stayed some of her development, largely hid the finesse that had helped to carry her to the top of the sport, and created a psychological problem.
When things get tight, players do what they know. What Świątek knew became hitting every ball as hard as possible. But when things get tight, things go wrong, and hitting a ball hard when things go wrong means missing, a lot.
Against McNally, she found that often elusive balance between raising her intensity while playing more methodical and patient tennis, as diametrically opposite as those two goals might appear at first glance.
'You can still raise your intensity and be patient and make smart decisions,' Świątek said after she prevailed.
'It just means that you're going to play these shots really 100 percent. But it doesn't mean that they need to be like crazy.'
Now, Wimbledon gets real, with a match that may test whether she can stick with something closer to the older version of herself, the one that Wim Fissette, the well-regarded coach who has worked with her since the end of last year, has tried to bring back to the court.
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In Danielle Collins, Świątek will face the player who took her apart in Rome on the red clay, her best surface, just two months ago. She pushed Świątek to the edge of her emotional danger zone, a place where she has spent a lot of time the past few months.
Collins hits a big ball, the kind that can send Świątek backpedaling, rushing her forehand. And there's some history, too. Collins, seemingly unjustifiably, ripped into Świątek for what she referred to as phoney sincerity when Collins had to retire during the third set of their quarterfinal at the Paris Olympics last summer.
Świątek said she had no idea Collins was talking about, because they had barely spoken previously.
The American will not bring a ton of subtlety to this match, on grass or on any other surface. She will see the ball and mostly try to tag the back of it, especially Świątek's attackable second serve.
She is also desperate to hang around this tournament, which she loves more than any other.
'For a landscaper's daughter, you know, and coming from humble beginnings, I cherish it,' Collins said after her 6-4, 6-1 win over Veronika Erjavec, the Slovenian qualifier.
'It makes it even that more special. And you can see it when I'm out on court. Wimbledon is the happiest time of the year for me. I can barely sleep at night. I'm so excited to get in the car each morning and come here.'
Collins said she also might find an extra boost of confidence against Świątek, who has won seven of their nine matches, knowing that Świątek has never felt comfortable on the grass. That looked especially true the past three years when she won the French Open, which robbed her of time to prepare for the grass. Low sliding shots do make it hard for her to get her racket under the ball on her topspin-heavy forehand — just as Coco Gauff found out when she went out in the first round.
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Last year, Świątek's first match on grass following her Roland Garros title was also her first match at Wimbledon. She only got to play three, losing in the third round to a redlining Yulia Putintseva. Then she lost in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open. Out went Tomasz Wiktorowski, who preached aggression from the baseline for three years. In came Fissette. He has steadily helped her to add more shape and patience to her tennis, which has in turn, at least at this tournament, started to reverse the notion that she is fundamentally not good on grass. Her win percentage is 72. That's hardly poor form.
But the big challenge for Świątek, resisting a reversion to the baseline aggression when matches get stressful, also gets magnified on grass, where sets can disappear in minutes and errors rack up more easily and quickly. It's early days at Wimbledon and there are hard matches ahead even if she beats Collins. Elena Rybakina, the 2022 champion who has troubled her in the past is a potential fourth-round matchup.
But it's clear Świątek is thinking differently on the grass this time round, especially after her success in Germany, where she beat Jasmine Paolini, last year's Wimbledon finalist, and Ekaterina Alexandrova, a big hitter capable of causing problems, on her way to the final.
'You just have to get through some situations on the court, and it gives you the extra experience and kind of the momentum to go forward,' She said ahead of Wimbledon.
For Świątek, her game on the grass is a work in progress, as it is everywhere. Each year, she learns a few things through experience. But she is one of the best players in the world, an all-time great already, playing at a tournament where the all-time greats usually figure out a way to win. It's the tournament where historically the best players generally do the best, because they figure out how to play aggressively, but with control, because often controlling points can be more important than trying to win them at the first chance.
'It's still tricky,' she said.
'You really have to trust your shots on grass. You can't really pull back. Any shot that will give your opponent more time to go in is probably the shot that will make you lose the rally.'