FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. — The latest pivot point in Iga Świątek’s tennis career happened when no one around her expected it, in May of this year. For most of the six months leading up to the Italian Open in Rome, she had been going through the motions of trying to evolve as a tennis player and as a person. She had hired Wim Fissette in October 2024. The renowned coach, who had helped guide Naomi Osaka and others to the top of the tennis world, had spent those six months trying to get her to restore the patient but tactically aggressive tennis of her early career. Daria Abramowicz, her sports psychologist and a key member of her team, had spent many hours on long talks with Świątek. She was trying to get her to leave her one-month anti-doping suspension for taking a contaminated dose of melatonin, a sleep aid, in the past.
The 24-year-old six-time Grand Slam champion wasn’t really listening to either of them. She heard them out, nodded plenty and showed fleeting signs of change. But when she walked onto the court and when she decompressed off it, she reverted to form. In matches, her first thought was to hit the ball as hard as possible, no matter how hard it was coming over the net. In her down time, her thoughts would drift back to last fall, when she tested positive for trimetazidine (TMZ), a banned substance.
The ITIA accepted her explanation that a contaminated batch of melatonin was the source of the positive test. Świątek submitted her medications and supplements to independent laboratories, alongside unopened containers from the same batches and hair samples. She missed two months of competition while provisionally suspended, losing the world No. 1 ranking to Aryna Sabalenka. For months, as she sought her championship form to win a tournament, she kept going back to the unfairness of it all. She reached the quarterfinals or the semifinals in all seven tournaments that she played before the Italian Open, but she also saw four title defenses thwarted. And then Danielle Collins smoked her in straight sets on Rome’s red clay, a surface where she dominates. Nine days earlier, Coco Gauff had blasted her off the court in Madrid; Jelena Ostapenko had beaten her in Stuttgart three weeks prior. Świątek, the queen of clay, was without a trophy on the surface for the first time since 2019.
In retrospect, that might be the best thing that ever happened to her. Two of those four title defenses had been on hard courts, in Doha, Qatar and Indian Wells, Calif. Świątek has seven WTA 1000 titles on the surface; she won the U.S. Open in 2022. And no matter what anyone told her, she figured she had opened herself up to new strategies. She was not the favorite, regardless of her previous success. That was fine with Fissette, because he could see she had opened her mind to new ideas. In one practice before the tournament, she ended up on the court with Alejandro Tabilo of Chile. Like most top women, Świątek often hits with men. She’s fine with the pace and used to the weight of their shots. Tabilo’s serve was a different story. At first it kept whizzing past her. Świątek, whose ability to turn just about any serve into a feast is a trademark, had her toes on the baseline, another old habit that had started to cause her more problems than it won her points.
Fissette told her to move back. She started landing returns in the court. Then she got to the French Open quarterfinals against Elena Rybakina, and got hammered 6-1 in the first set after standing too far up and too central to the 2022 Wimbledon champion’s powerful serve, especially the one she can swing away past a player’s forehand. In the second and third sets, she moved diagonally backward. She won. She did it again to Rybakina months later, at this year’s Cincinnati Open. And while she lost to Sabalenka in the semifinals in Paris, Fissette thought that it was a great result. Świątek wasn’t just playing differently; she was adjusting her tennis in real time, while sliding across the clay like a figure skater, just as she had done on clay for years. “She’s very skilled and she’s got good hands, but she hasn’t used those skills the last years,” he said. “She has learned to have this efficient, disciplined game. But at the end, you have to keep surprising. Otherwise players will understand exactly how you’re going to play. So you have to keep surprising. That’s the goal.”
He also wishes that Świątek didn’t have to have had such a rough go to get from there to here, to change from the player she was to the one she wants to be. “Sometimes it just takes a hard time,” he said. “It takes something that happens to make you do it.” This article originally appeared in The Athletic. Tennis, Women’s Tennis 2025 The Athletic Media Company
Fuente: https://sports.yahoo.com/article/iga-swiatek-tennis-evolution-wim-093106256.html