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 huge as they darted back and forth.
This was her impression of her former self.
“I keep in mind a time once I was solely in a position to focus for like 40 minutes and all of a sudden my head was like a pigeon,” Swiatek stated in an interview. “I used to be trying all over the 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 12 months 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 style — the total powers at her disposal.
“I’m not a Star Wars fan, however that is sensible,” Swiatek stated.
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 technology, 6-4, 6-0, final month within the Miami Open last, 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 title it’s fairly surreal nonetheless,” stated Swiatek, the primary No. 1 in singles from Poland on both tour.
Is she strolling taller now as she makes her manner across the grounds and locker rooms of Roland Garros and slaps palms along with her idol, the 13-time French Open champion Rafael Nadal, on the apply courts?
“I really feel a lot, a lot taller than two years in the past,” she stated.
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 towards Swiatek and defeated her in January in a event in Adelaide, Australia: considered one 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 outfitted to be a champion with endurance within the girls’s recreation the place the most important stars (the Williams sisters and Osaka) are not one of the best 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 just need to do that for a few years on tour,” Swiatek stated. “You’ll be able to’t burn your self out.”
Swiatek, a self-described perfectionist, and her group acknowledge that this trait cuts two methods in a sport during which perfection is inconceivable. It will possibly break gamers down as they bemoan the inevitable errors, however it will probably additionally gasoline a deep inside drive.
Swiatek is properly 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 last match of the season, she started crying on the court docket in the course of the last phases of her round-robin loss to Maria Sakkari.
“I felt like I used to be getting extra drained each month and for certain in Guadalajara that was for certain the height second for me the place I simply didn’t have battery you already know to form of management my feelings,” she stated.
With a watch on conserving battery energy, she is aiming for work-life stability, which suggests reducing 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 strategy 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 stated she realized after Abramowicz began touring along 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 truly round me on a regular basis,” she stated.
Abramowicz, 35, is a continuing companion at event 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 certain Swiatek didn’t learn the tip 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. “Regardless of how a lot storm there is happening round, there’s at all times a watch of the hurricane that needs to be calm; this core that needs to be at all times the identical,” she stated.
Abramowicz favors metaphors, and she or he and Swiatek use the picture of opening and shutting drawers.
“At first it was the whole lot that was tennis was in a single drawer and non-tennis stuff in a single drawer,” Abramowicz stated.
However they’ve expanded the idea and even use it to interrupt matches into extra manageable chunks.
To extend Swiatek’s capacity to play within the zone, they use varied brain-training instruments and expertise. However in addition they have used extra basic strategies: visualization and respiration workout routines, which Swiatek generally does on changeovers with a towel draped over her head.
For these accustomed to seeing Swiatek on the court docket, the place she performs in a cap along with her ponytail dangling out the again, it’s barely uncommon to be in her hatless presence along with her open regard and her shoulder-length darkish hair framing her face.
“I can’t measure her smartness, however she’s curious, and I feel it’s the way in which of being sensible,” stated 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 straightforward firm. She is quick-witted, even in her second language of English. She will be able to crack a joke; she deflects or flat-out rejects compliments and exchanges ebook suggestions as readily as groundstrokes even when the ebook titles, in contrast to the tennis titles, generally 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 stated.
The 20 books’ topics ranged extensively: from “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell to “The Disaster Caravan” by Linda Polman to “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert.
“I really feel bizarre generally once I don’t learn for just a few days,” Swiatek stated. “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 package deal, she has twice learn Andre Agassi’s autobiography “Open,” during 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 troublesome one,” she stated sounding, as she usually does, like she is about to chuckle with out making the transition to laughter.
“It’s a love-and-hate relationship for certain,” she stated of tennis. “I’m not the form 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, in all probability I wouldn’t be taking part in proper now. However for certain, I’m that form of one that likes to complete issues that I began.”
Swiatek’s father, the previous Olympic rower Tomasz Swiatek, continues to be concerned in her profession and is organizing a WTA event in Warsaw later this 12 months. Her dad and mom are divorced and her mom, an orthodontist, is “not within the image,” in keeping with Abramowicz.
Swiatek, whose profession prize cash simply handed $9 million, has bought a small condo in Warsaw however nonetheless lives on the household residence within the suburb of Raszyn.
Her street 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 Witkorowski, who beforehand labored with Agnieszka Radwanska, a former world No. 2 and Wimbledon finalist who retired in 2018.
Witkorowski joined Swiatek in December in the course of the low season after she break up with Piotr Sierzputowski, her coach for 5 years. Witkorowski has emphasised the optimistic, which turned 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 properly to give attention to her strengths.
“This type of angle helped me imagine that I might be extra aggressive on court docket and really use the strengths I’ve,” she stated, “Earlier than I used to be extra like analyzing how my opponent was taking part in and adjusting to that. However this 12 months I need to be extra proactive. I need to lead.”
Radwanska, a trick-shot artist nicknamed The Magician, was probably the most profitable fashionable Polish participant till Swiatek, however “Aga” was an underpowered counterpuncher 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 stated.
She and Ryszczuk are taking no possibilities. She doesn’t run off the court docket as a way to restrict pounding on her legs, utilizing train bicycles for the cardio work.
“The primary factor is to maintain her protected, robust and wholesome,” he stated.
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 in the course of the previous 18 months,” she stated. “I heard some tales about gamers who should not actually accountable in that a part of life. I additionally made some errors once I was youthful when it comes to signing issues. So proper now, I’m studying the whole lot.”
She is profitable the whole lot, too, and certainly not by coincidence. On Thursday, two days earlier than this French Open started, she was speaking on her telephone 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.”
