Is there anything for Iga Swiatek to do in her Jelena Ostapenko matchup?
One of the strangest head-to-heads in tennis got a little bit stranger last week. Jelena Ostapenko extended her record against the five-time Grand Slam champion and current world No. 2 Iga Swiatek to 5-0, with a 6-3, 6-1 win in the Qatar Open semifinals. In four of their five meetings, Ostapenko has been the lower-ranked player by a distance.
It is the heaviest defeat Swiatek has suffered in any match since a 6-2, 6-0 defeat to the same player in 2019, at a grass-court event in Birmingham, England. Swiatek, 18 then, was a qualifier at the tournament and ranked No. 65.
This latest win for Ostapenko, the 2017 French Open champion, was all the more extraordinary given that Swiatek was going for a fourth straight title in Doha. She hadn’t lost there since 2020. Ostapenko, ranked no. 37 when the match took place, needed just 71 minutes to thrash her much higher-ranked opponent before somewhat inevitably losing the final in straight sets to the lower-ranked Amanda Anisimova.
Source link
