PARIS: Iga Swiatek returns to a happy hunting ground in search of a maiden Olympic crown to add to her four French Open titles at Roland Garros.
The Polish world No. 1 has dominated on the red clay in Paris, winning four of her last five tournaments and is unbeaten there since her 2021 quarter-final loss to Greece's Maria Sakkari.
The five-time Grand Slam champion, who won the US Open in 2022, is looking to go much further than she did at the 2021 Tokyo Games, where she lost in the second round to Paula Badosa.
Swiatek, 23, had plenty of time to prepare for the Paris Olympics after her early exit at Wimbledon, where she lost in the third round to Yulia Putintseva.
The painful defeat on grass at the All England Club brought Swiatek's 21-match winning streak to a screeching halt.
Afterwards, she was asked how she would prepare for the Paris Olympics.
“I'm definitely going to take a lesson and get some rest,” she said. “I don't know, I feel like even though I didn't perform well in this tournament, the way the whole season looks, I deserve it.
“I literally have to do better because I'm not going to be able to go through the whole season playing good tennis.”
In 2020, Swiatek announced himself to the tennis world when he won the French Open without dropping a set.
She was the first Polish player, male or female, to win a Grand Slam singles title and has dominated the event ever since, with a single whistle three years ago.
Last month she defeated Italy's Jasmine Paolini in a one-sided final, becoming the fourth woman in the modern era to lift the Suzanne Lenglen Cup four times after Justine Henin, Chris Evert and Steffi Graf.
The world number 1 also completed a Madrid-Rome-Roland Garros clay treble. The only other woman in history to do it in the same season is Serena Williams.
Swiatek has sporting pedigree – her father Tomasz represented Poland in rowing at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.
“Normally, a young child would have difficulty hitting even one or two balls, but she could hold it for dozens of shots,” recalls Artur Szostaczko, her first coach.
“She was a fighter… I knew if it went to a super tie-break, there was no need to worry – Iga wouldn't crack under the pressure.”
Szostaczko taught Swiatek until he was 10 years old.
She was then coached by Michal Kaznowski, who recalls that Swiatek always wanted to be treated on an equal footing with her hard-working older sister Agata.
“Iga got really mad at me because I proposed a basic exercise where I would feed Agata eight balls but only six to Iga because she was younger,” he said.
“That made her angry. She went to her father and said she wanted as many as Agata.”
Swiatek will hope that determination will see her through to the gold medal on her favorite courts in Paris.
