Iga Swiatek

Following is reaction to world number one Iga Swiatek winning her second French Open title on Saturday with a 6-1 6-3 win over Coco Gauff in the final: COCO ...

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Tennis's top-ranked Swiatek beat Gauff 6-1, 6-3 in the final at Roland Garros. Swiatek's unbeaten run of 35 matches equals one by Venus Williams in 2000 as ...

Not in all cases, of course, but often, the spectators at Roland Garros tend to offer their support to underdogs and to whichever player is trailing in a particular match. Also key to Swiatek's presence, and swiftly burgeoning aura, is her calmness on court. Gauff began the second set by breaking Swiatek for the only time, and then holding to go up 2-0. Both of which applied to Gauff. So there was a surfeit of shouts of "Allez, Coco!" There were repeated cries of her chant-ready, two-syllable first name. Might this now be a much closer contest? Her last loss came in February to 2017 Roland Garros champion Jelena Ostapenko.

Saturday's game, between Świątek and Coco Gauff, provided a chance to glimpse potential greats at the beginning of their careers.

Gauff secured one last hold before Świątek held to win—and quickly set off to clamber up to her player’s box to hug her dad, her coach, her sports psychologist, and the rest of her team. She can hit it in any direction with deft disguise, and she can hit it with depth, wherever she happens to be on the court. The match left Gauff in tears and Świątek with a thirty-five-match winning streak, tied (with Venus Williams) for the longest on the women’s tour this century, and tied with Sharapova for the youngest in this century to win two majors. But to glimpse potential greats at the beginning of their careers is among the most satisfying things on offer from sports. To watch Świątek just now is to see fresh tennis greatness, and she played the finest tennis of her two weeks in Paris during Saturday’s final: mixing up her serves; returning aggressively; creating, with tactical savvy, yards of open court to strike winners into; finding the lines on the big points, again and again. Gauff broke Świątek’s serve to begin the second set, then held to go up 2–love. Świątek calmly won the next five games. In the sixth game of the first set, with Gauff having held for the first time in the previous game, Świątek closed out a hold of her own with two searing forehands, the first struck crosscourt, the second inside out to Gauff’s backhand corner. But Gauff has real problems with getting her spacing and balance right on the forehand side—she’s often crowding the ball, or stretching for it, when she is hitting on the run, or not stepping into it fully even when she seems to have time to set herself and smack away. Junior finals at the French Open are not held on the big show court, Philippe-Chatrier, and they are scheduled on days when the main-draw finals are being played and the focus of fans is there. They’d reached the women’s final on different trajectories. Junior finals get the attention of players’ parents, of coaches, of sponsors and potential sponsors. Gauff won the French Open girls’ final four years ago by defeating her friend and fellow-American, Caty McNally. McNally had reached the final by outlasting, in a tight, three-set semifinal, a sixteen-year-old Polish girl named Iga Świątek. COVID has done strange things to our sense of time passing; somehow, depending on our mood and the memory we’re seeking to summon, 2018 can seem like long ago or yesterday—we’ll need a Proust to help us navigate our recollections of the pandemic epoch.

Swiatek, 21, won her second Grand Slam title Saturday in Paris. The world's No. 1 player has won 35 straight matches.

Nadal walked beside him as Zverev reached up to shake the chair umpire’s hand, and his retirement from the match was announced. Nadal had claimed the 98-minute opening set by fending off four set points in a 10-8 tiebreaker. That’s going to be a big mental hurdle for Gauff to overcome as much as a physical one. Zverev, the 2020 U.S. Open runner-up, was seeking his second career appearance in a Grand Slam final. It was her first break point of the match, and she followed it up with a couple aces in the second game. Gauff didn’t win a single point in the fifth. The streak ties Venus Williams’s record and the title puts a second Grand Slam trophy on her shelf. That’s the last time 21-year-old Iga Swiatek lost a tennis match and she now has a second title at Roland Garros to go along with her incredible 35-match win streak. Gauff bolted to a better start to open the second set, capitalizing on a wild Swiatek forehand to break serve in the first game. It was surely a psychological boost but did little to rattle Swiatek, who closed the first set in 32 minutes. She had yet to drop a set in the tournament and took Court Philippe-Chatrier as the French Open’s 2018 girls’ junior champion. With it, Swiatek, who turned 21 last Tuesday, claimed her second Grand Slam title, adding to the 2020 French Open championship that she claimed as a relatively unknown 19-year-old.

The 21-year-old extended her 35-match unbeaten streak and captured her second Grand Slam trophy in Paris in commanding fashion.

Today, though, she couldn’t overcome her nerves and couldn’t overcome the opponent. She was the older player and the favorite. For six rounds, the 18-year-old American was a real star of the tournament, as she won a half dozen matches without dropping a set and revealed herself to be both a complete player and a complete person. She was the one with the win streak. She was the higher seed. This marked the 35th straight win, dating back to February, and the sixth consecutive title for Świątek, yet another indication that she is simply at another plane from the rest of the field.

On Saturday, Iga Swiatek beat Coco Gauff for her second French Open title. She has now won 35 matches in a row. What makes her so good?

"I kind of felt like the sky's the limit for me, so I feel more free right now," she said earlier this week. She reached the semifinals at the Australian Open and since then has been nothing short of perfect. But she knew exactly what she needed to do and was candid about her hopes for the future. "Hopefully we're going to see this final play out many, many times over the next 10 years, and hopefully this starts a little rivalry. "Also, I think the biggest change for me is going to be to be consistent. She was the fifth straight first-time major champion in the women's draw at Roland Garros, and she had seen other women have success but struggle to follow it up. She lost just eight games in total to Pegula and Daria Kasatkina, in the quarterfinals and semifinals. Swiatek had achieved modest success during her first year on tour in 2019, with a fourth-round appearance at Roland Garros and her first WTA final appearance, in Lugano. She was steadily ascending up the ranks. Much like this year, Swiatek stormed through the field -- allowing no opponent to win more than five games -- and took down top-seeded Simona Halep in just over an hour, 6-1, 6-2 in the fourth round. She faced Swiatek in the opening round and lasted just 54 minutes on court in a 6-2, 6-0 rout. Swiatek dropped just one set -- to 19-year-old Qinwen Zheng in the fourth round -- en route to the final. "She's kind of hit another level than all of us right now," said Jessica Pegula, who lost to Swiatek in the quarterfinals.

Swiatek, who took over as world number one when Australian Ash Barty announced her shock retirement in March, has now won 35 consecutive matches.

It was pretty tough, the pressure was big,” said Swiatek after sobbing when the Polish anthem was being played. But I mean, Wow! He has been a top athlete in our country for so many years that it still feels like it is hard to believe that he came to watch me. “I am happy that he is here, honestly.

PARIS (AP) — Iga Swiatek's first Grand Slam title came at the French Open in October 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic forced the tournament to shift from ...

“Yeah, there are many things,” she continued. We want to keep an eye on (her) strengths, and we will try to develop other tools.” I actually like the part that I have no expectations there. I don’t know about that yet,” she said. And as Swiatek thinks back now to that moment in time, she describes the whole thing this way: “Lucky.” “She really didn’t give me anything,” Gauff said. Swiatek won the junior title there in 2018. This is the best way, just to take everything step by step, one at a time. So I try to not panic and just be less stressed than they are.” But this is just the best option. “This time it was pure work.” Just the next match is important for us,” Wiktorowski said.

The world No.1 seems unstoppable as she surpasses Serena Williams' career-best unbeaten run.

Just with everything that was going on, I'm also more aware of how it is to win a Grand Slam and what it takes and how every puzzle has to come together and basically every aspect of the game has to work. This time I felt like I really did the work.” “This time it was pure work and pure...

Whether it's the streak, her second Grand Slam title or the top ranking, the only true measure of Iga Swiatek's accomplishments is history itself.

“I think it’s going to be a little bit different. Swiatek’s chief strategy was targeting Gauff’s forehand – of the teenager’s 23 unforced errors, 16 came on that wing. “So when I was playing quarterfinal, I felt like even if something is going to go bad, I still know how to come back. I mean, there was lot of confusion in me, for sure.” So I tried to take just positives from it.” Back in March, Iga Swiatek was working on what in retrospect feels like a quaint little winning streak of 11 matches.

Two-time women's Roland Garros champion Iga Swiatek says that lessons drawn from her idol Rafael Nadal have helped keep her dizzying success in perspective.

It's normal’. Not everybody can do that and just treat those big moments as another match.” “I feel like all these great champions, they kind of accept that they may lose. “I think the best thing I can learn from him is how he's cool about what's going on around him,” Swiatek said.