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.”

Swiatek’s tennis breakthrough came in 2020, when she won the French Open for the first time ranked world No. 54. But it’s her 2022 season, in which she first became world No. 1, that defines her.

When Ash Barty announced her shock retirement, Swiatek reached the top of the rankings by surprise. She promptly blew away any suggestion of being an unworthy usurper by going on a 37-match winning streak from February to June 2022. It took in six titles, and was the joint-longest run on the WTA side since Steffi Graf’s between 1989 and 1990. Swiatek’s streak ended in the Wimbledon third round, but she then won the U.S. Open to offer a rejoinder to those who tried to characterize her as someone who could only thrive on clay.

2022 introduced the wider tennis world to Swiatek’s extraordinary capacity for winning sets 6-0 and 6-1 (there were 45 such sets in her 76 matches that year). These “bagel” and “breadstick” scorelines became so commonplace that “Iga’s Bakery” entered tennis parlance, with Swiatek winning 67 of her 76 matches for a win percentage of 88.2, up from 70.6 the previous year. She is yet to better that figure.

Swiatek found the right balance of knowing when to attack and when to retreat, and used her topspin forehand to devastating effect. It can feel unnatural for a world No. 1 to not always be the aggressor, but Swiatek’s phenomenal movement and intensity meant that even when she was against a more powerful opponent she would very rarely be outmanoeuvred.

“We are working in a different way a little bit, in terms of getting back to my roots,” Swiatek says of how she and Fissette are moving her tennis forward.

“I feel like I can really be a great defensive player, but use my chances to be proactive, as I did a little better in 2022. So with Wim we’re working on my footwork a lot, just movement and being able to get back up from really defensive, tough positions to to still win a point.”

Swiatek and Fissette started working together in October, but last month’s Australian Open was their first Grand Slam together. Swiatek racked up set scores of 6-3, 6-4, 6-0, 6-2, 6-1, 6-0, 6-0, 6-1, 6-1 and 6-2 to reach the semifinals, at times by overpowering opponents but more often by picking the moment to take over a rally. After losing just one game in beating former U.S. Open champion Emma Raducanu to reach the fourth round, Swiatek in a news conference described her performance as “kind of perfect,” adding that “I felt like the ball is listening to me.”

“I feel like in Australia it has been working really well,” she said in the video interview, now with a bit of distance from the event. “And I felt the control over the ball and a lot of confidence because I knew that I had kind of nothing to lose … I can only go forward and use what Wim has brought to the team. Obviously with more time on the practice court also some changes in my game are going to come.

“You know, over the past few years, I learned how to be an aggressive player. And the player that uses the first chance in the rally to go forward … I always have to remember what is really my biggest weapon.”

Swiatek’s run to the Melbourne semifinals was her deepest run at a hard-court major since her title in New York. It’s a curious lean spell because outside of the majors, Swiatek has excelled on the surface. In 2023, Swiatek won 42 out of 50 hard-court matches for an 84 percent win-rate, while last year she went 34-6 (85 percent). Even Sabalenka, world No. 1 and hard-court extraordinaire, can’t match those win percentages, and Swiatek has won 12 of her 22 WTA Tour titles on the surface.

“It’s just physics,” Swiatek says. “On clay, it’s going to be a bit easier because my topspin will jump higher and my movements will be maybe better than what other girls can bring with the sliding and changing direction. But on hard courts, I feel like I’m a good player as well.

“It was the same with Rafa (Nadal). Everybody always talked about clay, but like he’s the GOAT (greatest of all time) basically on every surface. Also winning Wimbledon twice. Not every player can have these results on even one surface. This is something that people are focusing on, and I am talking about this as well, because clay is where I have the most fun, but I love hard courts as well. And I feel like I have my weapons and I can use them.

“I want to be an all surface player for sure.”

2024 dented Swiatek’s ambitions to be an all-surface player. Outside of winning a fourth French Open, she went out in the third round at the Australian Open and Wimbledon, and the quarters at the U.S. Open.

Going back to some of the most disappointing defeats of last year in order to learn from them has been part of her evolution process. Thinking back to the Noskova loss in Melbourne, as well as the ones to Yulia Putintseva and Jessica Pegula at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, Swiatek admits: “There are matches where I know what went wrong and I even knew that on the court. But I had trouble implementing my tactics and doing what we actually agreed with the coach.”

She was “pretty confused” by the defeat to Putintseva, in which the Kazakh produced a practically flawless hour of tennis in a display overshadowed by discourse about Swiatek and grass. Putintseva at one point made just one unforced error in 11 games, but Swiatek also did not appear to have any answer to change the flow of the match. This stands in contrast to a fundamental of Swiatek’s game from three years ago, which she says she is working with Fissette to restore: “My plan B with running, to really make my opponents think twice of how to play, because I want them to be aware that the ball is going to come back.”

While Wimbledon remains a key ambition, she is realistic about how difficult this will be if she continues to win the French Open with such regularity, given the tight turnaround between the two. Swiatek tends to play a huge amount during the clay-court season because of her similarly excellent record at the events prior to Roland Garros, last year winning the two clay-court WTA 1,000 titles (one rung below a Grand Slam). It’s easy to take this Nadal-like domination of the surface for granted, but it is exceptional, and takes a toll.

A month after last year’s Wimbledon and having suffered the disappointment of ‘only’ winning a bronze medal at the Paris Olympics, also held at Roland Garros, Swiatek spoke at the Cincinnati Open about the relentlessness of the schedule.

“I think we have too many tournaments in the season,” she told Sky Sports after beating Mirra Andreeva to reach the semifinals, where she lost to Sabalenka.

“It’s not going to end well. It makes tennis less fun for us. I love playing in all these places, but it’s pretty exhausting and I think most of the WTA players would tell you that, especially when you’re playing at a high level.

“I don’t think it should be like that because we deserve to rest a little bit more. Maybe people are going to hate me (for saying that).”

At the U.S. Open shortly after, Swiatek appeared burnt out, as did many players in the wake of an Olympic Games that made 2024 an even more exhausting schedule than usual. “For sure, sometimes I have this feeling like I need to, I don’t know, please people,” she says. “Or I don’t know, play tennis to entertain. And it’s not easy to do that when I don’t feel 100 percent on the court. But most of the time I really enjoy this and most of the time I have a lot of energy from the fans.”

Like an increasing number of players on the tour, Swiatek has been open about her mental health. In Poland, especially among her parents’ generation, it has often been a taboo. Swiatek has been determined to challenge that: “I think the most important thing is knowing that there are specialists out there that can help you. So I just want people to be aware of that because I know that many of us struggle no matter what our job and our situation is.

“It’s been an important topic over the past years. And in the future, for sure, it will be — also with with us constantly being on social media where people judge us and they comment stuff that they wouldn’t really say to our face. This is also something that I think kids at school struggle with. So people need to be aware that they can use help.”

From very early on in her career, Swiatek has placed a huge amount of importance on her state of mind, allowing a psychology and mental coach to play a central role in her training. In 2019, when starting out as a teenager on the WTA Tour, the Polish psychologist and former sailor Daria Abramowicz started becoming a regular attendee at her matches. Six years on, Abramowicz is still a crucial member of the Swiatek team.

To find calm at high-pressure moments, Swiatek likes to be at one with nature — finding a quiet park or beach during a Grand Slam. Sometimes she finds other outlets — ahead of the Australian Open in 2021, she watched and reflected on a documentary about Princess Diana to better understand the pitfalls of sudden fame.

A big part of the work Abramowicz has done with Swiatek has been to deepen the player’s relationships with relatives and friends, the people who can provide emotional stability — “the human anchor,” as Abramowicz calls it.

This came in especially useful in September last year, when Swiatek was given a provisional suspension after testing positive for a trace concentration of the banned substance trimetazidine (TMZ). The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) ultimately issued a one-month doping ban, after ruling that Swiatek’s ingestion of TMZ was not intentional. They accepted her explanation and evidence that she had taken a contaminated dose of melatonin, which she had used to help her sleep to combat jet lag.

But for a couple of months, Swiatek was in limbo. She was informed of the positive result on September 12, exactly a month after testing positive in an out-of-competition sample on August 12 ahead of the Cincinnati Open. Swiatek appealed the provisional suspension within 10 days of the original notice and the appeal was successful, so her provisional suspension was not publicly disclosed. This is in line with the TADP (Tennis Anti-Doping Programme) regulations, and is the same mechanism by which the men’s world No. 1 Jannik Sinner’s two provisional suspensions, imposed after he twice tested positive for the anabolic steroid clostebol, were not disclosed.

Swiatek missed three events while the process was ongoing, leading her to lose the No. 1 ranking. She explained her absence from the first of them, the China Open in September, by citing “personal matters.” Some felt let down by the obfuscation when her ban was made public in November, having believed that Swiatek was taking some time out having appeared so mentally and physically exhausted at the U.S. Open, her most recent event.

“For sure, it wasn’t easy to keep everything inside,” she says.

“On the other hand, I had my support team and my family as well. So I think it’s important for your closest ones to be there when you need them.

“Also, I know that it would be tricky if the info got out to the public earlier because without the proper explanation and actually without the whole process that happened afterwards, of me proving that I’m not guilty… I think without this, people will judge me straight away.”

Swiatek says that “the most difficult thing was just not knowing what’s going to happen with me for some time, not having my own fate in my hands. It was a tough lesson because I’m a control freak”.

Swiatek is also someone who comes across as eager to please, and her discomfort at the indiscretion, and the resulting perceptions of her, has been obvious.

After losing to Keys 10-8 in that Melbourne tiebreak, Swiatek had none of the confusion and concern that came with her defeat to Noskova.

“This year it was different,” she said in a news conference. “For sure it gives me a positive vibe for the rest of the season.” In Melbourne, she was back to hitting her prodigious forehand with lots of spin, and again seemed to be finding the right balance between knowing when to attack and when to rely on her phenomenal athleticism and anticipation. Her smoothed-out serve has gained speed and potency since 2022, but it is still a work in progress.

Part of the positivity she feels is down to Fissette: “He has had a huge impact in terms of what kind of atmosphere I have in the team. And also, you know, the support he has given me to be more confident, and just more committed sometimes to the shots that haven’t been working 100 percent previously.”

To thrive on the court, she needs to feel content off it too. To unwind, Swiatek builds Lego and reads books — she’s currently reading R. F. Kuang’s fantasy novel, “Babel.” She loves listening to music, from harder rock like AC/DC and Guns N’ Roses to bands like Pink Floyd, Florence and the Machine and poppier acts like Taylor Swift and ABBA. She says that if she could be anything but a tennis player she would be a musician.

“But I think I have no talent, so it would be tough,” she deadpans.

Maybe something to do with math would be more natural to Swiatek. That was her favourite subject at school, and a few years ago Abramowicz noticed how Swiatek became both calmer and more focused if she spent the hours before her matches working on homework, especially math. Once she’d graduated from high school, Abramowicz had Swiatek work on crossword puzzles or sudokus as a cognitive warm-up.

A natural introvert, Swiatek does not first appear to be someone who might relish all the off-court commitments with sponsors that a sporting superstar has to manage. But she says that while she “totally just cuts off” from this sort of thing during tournaments, outside of them it’s a different story.

“I love having photoshoots and I can feel a bit different sometimes doing a photoshoot for Lancome or all these brands that are really elegant,” she says. “Usually sweating on the court is a different feeling than being in a beautiful dress and smiling for the camera. So I really enjoy that.”

Looking ahead, Swiatek hopes that, unlike last year, the Australian Open will provide a platform for the rest of the season. Graf, one of her role models like Nadal, feels optimistic on her behalf.

“She’s definitely set herself apart the last few years and I think with her start to the year, she’ll come back strong,” the 22-time Grand Slam singles champion said in a phone interview last week.

For Swiatek, coming back strong means “being on tour and enjoying playing, also taking care of the people that are around me. To have a good atmosphere so that we can all just be happy on tour, you know? So this is what I hope for.” In Doha, coming back strong means a third-round match — against Noskova, her conqueror in Melbourne little over a year ago. The time machine whirrs into life again.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Tennis, Women's Tennis

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