PARIS — Iga Swiatek, unbeaten since February, was sitting within the gamers’ restaurant on the French Open and twisting her head proper and left at excessive pace, her eyes comically extensive as they darted back and forth.
This was her impression of her former self.
“I bear in mind a time after I was solely capable of focus for like 40 minutes and all of a sudden my head was like a pigeon,” Swiatek mentioned in an interview. “I used to be trying in every single place however the place I ought to have been trying.”
Her gaze and her recreation are fairly steadier now. After profitable the French Open in 2020 out of the blue and out of season in October as an unseeded teenager, she is again in Paris this yr within the spring as a dominant and more and more intimidating world No. 1.
At age 20, it’s as if she has grasped — in Jedi Knight vogue — the complete powers at her disposal.
“I’m not a Star Wars fan, however that is smart,” Swiatek mentioned.
Swiatek, who claimed the highest girls’s singles rating on April 3, has received 5 straight tournaments: three on hardcourts and two on clay. She has received 29 straight singles matches, the longest streak in 9 years on the WTA Tour, usually prevailing by lopsided, in-the-zone margins which have followers joking that she should get pleasure from baking due to all of the bagels (units received 6-0) and baguettes (units received 6-1).
She trounced Naomi Osaka, probably the most well-known participant of their era, 6-4, 6-0, final month within the Miami Open ultimate, and Swiatek reopened the bakery on Monday, routing the Ukrainian qualifier Lesia Tsurenko, 6-2, 6-0, in simply 54 minutes within the first spherical of the French Open.
“Once I see the rating subsequent to my identify it’s fairly surreal nonetheless,” mentioned Swiatek, the primary No. 1 in singles from Poland on both tour.
Is she strolling taller now as she makes her method across the grounds and locker rooms of Roland Garros and slaps arms together with her idol, the 13-time French Open champion Rafael Nadal, on the follow courts?
“I really feel a lot, a lot taller than two years in the past,” she mentioned.
A few of Swiatek’s newfound dominance is due little question to the shock abdication by Ashleigh Barty, the Australian star with the entire recreation who retired all of a sudden in March at age 25 whereas holding the No. 1 rating shortly after profitable the Australian Open. Barty was 2-0 in opposition to Swiatek and defeated her in January in a match in Adelaide, Australia: one in every of solely three losses for Swiatek this season.
However Swiatek, one of many quickest and most acrobatic athletes within the girls’s recreation, was already constructing momentum with Tomasz Wiktorowski, her new coach, earlier than Barty’s retirement. With a yen for self-improvement and world journey and a long-term plan to keep away from accidents and ennui, Swiatek seems geared up to be a champion with endurance within the girls’s recreation the place the most important stars (the Williams sisters and Osaka) are not the most effective gamers and the place too many new stars have slumped or, in Barty’s case, stepped away altogether.
“You must remind your self that you simply wish to do that for a few years on tour,” Swiatek mentioned. “You may’t burn your self out.”
Swiatek, a self-described perfectionist, and her group acknowledge that this trait cuts two methods in a sport by which perfection is unattainable. It may break gamers down as they bemoan the inevitable errors, however it will possibly additionally gasoline a deep inside drive.
Swiatek is effectively conscious of the draw back, which is partly why she has labored with psychologists since her junior profession. She nonetheless has her struggles. On the WTA Finals final November in Guadalajara, Mexico, in her ultimate match of the season, she started crying on the courtroom throughout the ultimate levels of her round-robin loss to Maria Sakkari.
“I felt like I used to be getting extra drained each month and for positive in Guadalajara that was for positive the height second for me the place I simply didn’t have battery you realize to type of management my feelings,” she mentioned.
With an eye fixed on conserving battery energy, she is aiming for work-life stability, which implies chopping again on taking part in doubles and including extra vacationer time within the cities she visits after all of the pandemic restrictions and tournament-only bubbles of 2020 and 2021. In Rome this month, on her option to her newest title, she took within the Colosseum and made two visits to the Vatican.
Avoiding burnout additionally means compartmentalizing, and Swiatek’s compartmentalizer-in-chief is Daria Abramowicz, her full-time efficiency psychologist.
Swiatek mentioned she realized after Abramowicz began touring together with her to tournaments in 2019 that sports activities psychology was greatest practiced on web site, not throughout workplace visits in Warsaw.
“It’s simply a lot, a lot simpler for me to belief any individual who’s really round me on a regular basis,” she mentioned.
Abramowicz, 35, is a continuing companion at match websites, intently monitoring Swiatek’s mind-set and power ranges. She is pushing Swiatek to maintain her solutions shorter in information conferences to preserve power. She even made positive Swiatek didn’t learn the top of the novel “Gone With the Wind” on the identical day she had a match to keep away from draining her emotionally.
Abramowicz desires to create a haven for Swiatek via her routine and help system. “Irrespective of how a lot storm there is happening round, there’s at all times an eye fixed of the hurricane that must be calm; this core that must be at all times the identical,” she mentioned.
Abramowicz favors metaphors, and she or he and Swiatek use the picture of opening and shutting drawers.
“At first it was all the things that was tennis was in a single drawer and non-tennis stuff in a single drawer,” Abramowicz mentioned.
However they’ve expanded the idea and even use it to interrupt matches into extra manageable chunks.
To extend Swiatek’s skill to play within the zone, they use numerous brain-training instruments and expertise. However additionally they have used extra traditional strategies: visualization and respiration workouts, which Swiatek typically does on changeovers with a towel draped over her head.
For these accustomed to seeing Swiatek on the courtroom, the place she performs in a cap together with her ponytail dangling out the again, it’s a novelty to be in her hatless presence together with her shoulder-length darkish hair framing her face. She has an open regard.
“I can’t measure her smartness, however she’s curious, and I believe it’s the way in which of being sensible,” mentioned Maciej Ryszczuk, Swiatek’s health coach and physiotherapist. “If she doesn’t know one thing, she’s asking and if not, she’s studying about it.”
Although Swiatek calls herself shy and will get drained by an excessive amount of socializing, she is simple firm. She is quick-witted, even in her second language of English. She will crack a joke; she deflects or flat-out rejects compliments and exchanges e-book suggestions as readily as groundstrokes even when the e-book titles, not like the tennis titles, typically escape her.
For her twentieth birthday, her administration group gave her 20 books, all in Polish as a result of for Swiatek studying long-form in English, regardless of her fluency within the language, nonetheless looks like learning. “I’m at all times writing down phrases I don’t know,” she mentioned.
The 20 books’ topics ranged broadly: from “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell to “The Disaster Caravan” by Linda Polman to “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert.
“I really feel bizarre typically after I don’t learn for a number of days,” Swiatek mentioned. “As a result of I really feel like, Oh, that’s a sign I don’t have the stability in my life I ought to have.”
Although there have been no tennis books in her birthday bundle, she has twice learn Andre Agassi’s autobiography “Open,” by which he writes about coming to like the sport after hating it.
The place is she on that scale?
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s a tricky one,” she mentioned sounding, as she usually does, like she is about to chortle with out making the transition to laughter.
“It’s a love-and-hate relationship for positive,” she mentioned of tennis. “I’m not the type of one that fell in love with it from the primary time. I’m conscious of the truth that if my dad had not been so persistent and so encouraging for me to proceed taking part in tennis, most likely I wouldn’t be taking part in proper now. However for positive, I’m that type of one that likes to complete issues that I began.”
Swiatek’s father, the previous Olympic rower Tomasz Swiatek, remains to be concerned in her profession and is organizing a WTA match in Warsaw later this yr. Her mother and father are divorced. Her mom, an orthodontist, is “not within the image,” based on Abramowicz.
Swiatek, whose profession prize cash simply handed $9 million, has bought a small residence in Warsaw however nonetheless lives on the household residence within the suburb of Raszyn.
Her highway journeys have been very profitable of late as Swiatek, tight to the baseline, imposes her rhythm and shrinks the open area: strolling briskly between factors and setting a torrid tempo as soon as factors start.
Her confidence in her aggressive Plan A is palpable. This full-court press is by design: a part of the plan advisable by Wiktorowski, who beforehand labored with Agnieszka Radwanska, a former world No. 2 and Wimbledon finalist who retired in 2018.
Wiktorowski joined Swiatek in December throughout the low season after she cut up with Piotr Sierzputowski, her coach for 5 years. Wiktorowski has emphasised the constructive, which grew to become clear as they watched movies of her matches. Swiatek wished to look at defeats to study from her errors. He insisted on watching victories as effectively to deal with her strengths.
“This sort of perspective helped me imagine that I may be extra aggressive on courtroom and truly use the strengths I’ve,” she mentioned, “Earlier than I used to be extra like analyzing how my opponent was taking part in and adjusting to that. However this yr I wish to be extra proactive. I wish to lead.”
Radwanska, a trick-shot artist nicknamed The Magician, was probably the most profitable trendy Polish participant till Swiatek, however “Aga” was an underpowered counterpuncher as compared with “Iga”, whose signature shot is her explosive inside-out forehand, a bludgeoning blow that options heavy topspin.
Swiatek believes in her work and that she has “good genes” due to her Olympian father. “I really feel my physique was made to be concerned in sports activities,” she mentioned.
She and Ryszczuk are taking no possibilities. She doesn’t run off the courtroom so as to restrict pounding on her legs, utilizing train bicycles for the cardio work.
“The principle factor is to maintain her secure, sturdy and wholesome,” he mentioned.
It’s a long-term plan for a long-term planner, who makes good use of her Google calendar and likes to regulate not solely her strokes however her enterprise.
“I’ve learn so many offers, so many contracts throughout the previous 18 months,” she mentioned. “I heard some tales about gamers who will not be actually accountable in that a part of life. I additionally made some errors after I was youthful by way of signing issues. So proper now, I’m studying all the things.”
She is profitable all the things, too, and certainly not by coincidence. On Thursday, three days earlier than this French Open started, she was speaking on her cellphone outdoors the principle stadium whereas Abramowicz watched her from a bench at a distance.
“It’s the final day for enterprise calls,” Abramowicz defined. “After that, it’s time to shut that drawer and open one other.”
