Just over a year ago, Iga Swiatek was fresh from a confounding loss. Unseeded Czech teenager Linda Noskova had ended Swiatek’s bid for a first Australian Open title in the third round, with the big-hitting 19-year-old coming from a set down to overpower the then-world No. 1. Swiatek knew her opponent had played brilliantly, but she was confused by her own form. She had been playing well ahead of the first major of 2024, but then “saw my tennis being worse and worse every day,” she said in an interview from her home in Warsaw a fortnight ago.
The 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 loss was not the only such defeat of 2024, a tumultuous year for Swiatek. She won her fourth French Open title and third in a row, but lost early in two of the other Grand Slams. She split with her coach of three years, Tomasz Wiktorowski, with whom she won all but one of her majors, and she ended the season with a one-month doping ban during which she relinquished her world No. 1 ranking to Aryna Sabalenka, after being found to have inadvertently ingested a banned substance via contaminated medication.
On the court, her still-rare defeats had started to take increasingly similar shape. Swiatek would move out in front, and her opponent would raise their level. She would keep trying to dominate them, with little response to what was coming back over the net. Her groundstrokes would break down, particularly on her forehand. She would try and hit harder and miss more, and then the match would be over.
“Sometimes I felt like my decisions weren’t really perfect on the court. I started playing, you know, too flat,” she said.
In response, Swiatek hired Wim Fissette, who previously coached Kim Clijsters, Angelique Kerber and Naomi Osaka to Grand Slam titles. Fissette is her first coach from outside Poland, and their partnership has already shown promise for Swiatek’s tennis future. She got within a point of the Australian Open final after a ruthless run to the semifinals, where she lost to eventual champion Madison Keys in a deciding tiebreak. But her progress is less about revolution than evolution; as much about going back in time as it is looking forward.
Swiatek, 23, has already won five Grand Slam titles, four of them at the French Open. She has spent 125 weeks at world No. 1 – a tally bettered by only six players ever. She is a global superstar, with huge commercial deals with brands like Lancome, Visa and Porsche. The incremental adjustments going on inside her tennis time machine aren’t always visible through that lens, as she moves from tournament to tournament, now alighting in Doha, Qatar where she is attempting to win the Qatar Open for the fourth time in a row.
“I see my game every day,” she said. “It’s hard to see the changes because they’re little. I know. They only seem big on a bigger horizon.”
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