Iga Swiatek started flirting with a very strange idea last fall.
This was after she’d finished the season as world No. 1 for a second consecutive year. After she’d won her fourth Grand Slam title and her third French Open, while still just 22 years old. Last month those numbers flipped up to five Grand Slam titles and four French Opens at 23 — but it’s the flirtation with weirdness in late 2023 that is most vital right now as the lawns of SW19 in London emerge from under cover.
Ah, the champion’s lament — and in Swiatek’s case a very specific one. She’s a wondrous player; a generational talent who could quit tomorrow and walk into the Hall of Fame. But the Pole, like so many who have come before her, knows that her career will remain incomplete unless she wins Wimbledon.
It’s a cruel joke that modern tennis has played on everyone.
Take the most mythical tournament on the calendar, the one that all truly great players believe they need to win to solidify that greatness — and keep it on the quirkiest surface, one that basically no one spends any significant time on growing up, and that takes up slightly more than a month of the tour calendar with little time to prepare for — that for so many matters more than any other.
And if you don’t win… Well, no one who enters with a legitimate chance really wants to talk about that possibility.
This is how it is for Swiatek, and for Jannik Sinner, the 22-year-old world No 1 from Italy and the reigning Australian Open champion. That’s all well and good kid, but can you win in the sport’s cradle, even though the tennis that happens at Wimbledon bears only a passing resemblance to the tennis that happens the rest of the year?
No one said life was fair on or off the tennis court.
Sinner is doing his darndest to make it happen, winning the warmup tournament in Halle this month to get the feel of grass back in his knees and hands.
