The Świątek problem: can Coco Gauff flip the script at Roland Garros?

Yahoo

2 days ago

If she only had the fortune of being born seven years earlier, Coco Gauff might have won Roland Garros three times already. Gauff, now 21 years old, hasn't lost before the quarter-final of the tournament since she was 16, a run of consistency many top players would kill for. Good luck hitting through her on the slow clay surface, she is blindingly fast. She can rip her backhand down the line and offset her shaky forehand by loading the ball with topspin and fluttering it deep towards the opponent's baseline.
All this, on paper, makes for a modern clay-court great – or at the very least, the first American Roland Garros champion since (who else?) Serena Williams. But Gauff is yet to win the title at Roland Garros, or receive much credit for her clay-court pedigree. All thanks to the cosmically bad luck of sharing a generation with Iga Natalia Świątek.
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Świątek has won Roland Garros four times in the past five years, starting at age 19, an alarmingly Nadalian pace. Everybody else has suffered from her resolute gatekeeping, but nobody more so than Gauff. In the 2022 final, 2023 quarter-final, and 2024 semi-final, Gauff ran smack into Świątek, who dismissed her in straight sets each time. None of these sets have even been especially close. It gets worse: Świątek is 23, close enough in age to Gauff that Gauff can't count on her rival aging out of contention first. Unless she can win Roland Garros – and she'll probably have to beat Świątek to do it – Gauff is doomed to be perpetually underrated on clay. Setting the record straight might well be the ultimate challenge of her entire career.
As a cautionary tale for Gauff, the Roland Garros YouTube channel has spent the past few weeks uploading full replays of Rafael Nadal's 14 finals at the tournament, many of them against Roger Federer. To someone watching the dusty battles for the first time, they're probably distinct. 2006 was the year Federer won the first set, he had a cataclysmic break point conversion rate in 2007, Nadal just flattened him in 2008. But to the hardcore fan, and probably to Federer, those finals all blend together into the same match. They're athletically impressive and occasionally competitive but never quite close. Federer, one of the greatest players of all time, not only lost each time he played Nadal at Roland Garros but never even looked like winning.
To her credit, Gauff has tried on several different styles in her attempts to unseat Świątek (a relative rarity in tennis; abandoning the core tenets of the play that helped someone reach the top 10 must feel like fleeing a loving parent for a stranger), but each has produced the same result so far. In 2022, Gauff's first major final, the nervous then-18-year-old produced a shaky rendition of her standard game and got blown out. In 2023, she cut down on errors, but couldn't match Świątek's firepower. In 2024, she bravely attacked every forehand she could – Going For It, as we are so eager for athletes to do – acting as if she possessed Naomi Osaka's fearsome forehand rather than her own. But the execution wasn't there, and, as if being teased for her courage, Gauff won just six games, the exact same as in her 2023 loss.
Matchups like this can feel mythically tragic after a while, like the task of beating the rival has been designed by cruel gods. Play badly, get erased; play well, get soundly beaten; overcome your limits, get your heart broken. In the second round of Roland Garros last year, Osaka became the first player to neuter Świątek for a prolonged period at the tournament, crushing groundstrokes with so much raw power – a power Gauff doesn't possess even on her best day – that Świątek didn't have enough time to muster a counteroffensive. Osaka dominated an hour-long stretch of the match, then, one point away from victory, crumbled and lost. You sort of knew it would happen. Sisphyus had his traitorous rock and Orpheus had a mandate against temptation; those hoping to win Roland Garros have Świątek.
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Gauff's struggles have far less to do with finish-line nerves than the level of difficulty on the shots she has to hit to make headway against Świątek. There's a point during their 2024 meeting that sums up her plight. Gauff actually wins the rally, but to do it, had to hit two shots into nooks of the court so vanishingly small that her confidence seemed to recede rather than grow. Likely too aware of how difficult those shots were to make, Gauff sprayed her shots wide of their targets and only won one more game for the rest of the match.
To beat Świątek at Roland Garros, Gauff would have to maintain accurate helter-skelter aggression for a sustained two-hour period (ie shoot 100% on 20 three-pointers, bat for the cycle against the best pitcher alive, score a hat-trick twice over), or hope for a complete Świątek implosion. Maybe both.
This year, there is reason to think that at least one of those two outcomes is possible. After losing 11 of her first 12 matches to Świątek, Gauff has won the last three in straight sets, establishing some physical and psychological patterns that might come into play at Roland Garros.
In January, Gauff beat Świątek at the team-based United Cup event by ruining her confidence in her best shots. She relied on her legs to reach even Świątek's heaviest haymakers, and they did. Gauff sent typically point-ending shots back into uncomfortable positions, a stupefying proposition. ('The balls she puts back into play are truly comical,' the tennis writer Giri Nathan told me of Gauff in 2023.) Gauff's court coverage grew so stifling that Świątek had to squeeze her groundstrokes down ever-narrowing channels of space to hit winners, and inevitably missed more than she made. Gauff came away with an authoritative win that made it seem like she was the one with a yawning lead in the head-to-head.
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Still, there was reason to think it would be different on Świątek's favored clay. On 1 May, she and Gauff met in the semi-finals of the Madrid Open. Both players had been in patchy form all week, and as always, Świątek was the favorite. But from the jump, Gauff took control, this time with her offense. She met fire with fire, hitting meaty forehands, and more accurately than she had at Roland Garros in 2024. Accustomed to breaking down Gauff's forehand with ease, Świątek countered with desperate, blind aggression, and her usual accuracy warped beyond recognition. Gauff barely put a foot wrong, letting Świątek's implosion run its course, and put up the most one-sided scoreline Świątek had ever suffered in a clay loss. The result suggested something was seriously amiss with the defending Roland Garros champion.
Świątek, in fact, is in crisis. At the Olympics last year, played at her beloved Roland Garros grounds, Świątek shockingly lost in the semi-finals and had to settle for a bronze medal. In August, she tested positive for the banned substance TMZ – the International Tennis Integrity Agency accepted a thorough explanation that the test was due to a contaminated melatonin supplement – and served a one-month ban.
Since her return, she has seemed more tightly wound on court. Her form has dissolved since a loss at the Australian Open semi-finals, her first ever from match point up (at last she knew how it felt to play herself). At Indian Wells, a ballkid tossed Świątek a ball only for Świątek to bounce it hard over his head, making him flinch. The subsequent backlash prompted her to release a lengthy apology confessing to the stress and unhappiness she had felt over the previous months.
Even at the Italian Open, a tournament Świątek had dominated three of the last four years, the trend continued. She lost in a harried two sets to Danielle Collins, looking just as lost as she had against Gauff in Madrid in the opener. Gauff, meanwhile, made it to the final before losing to the in-form home favorite Jasmine Paolini. Thanks to Paolini's win, Świątek slipped down to fifth in the rankings. She has not been ranked this low, or lost to Collins, since 2022.
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In a sport as fiercely individual as tennis, Świątek's crisis is hers alone. It's fuel for her rivals. Everybody knows well that tangible chances to win Roland Garros will be few and far between as long as Świątek is on tour, and will play with even more vigor now that she seems vulnerable.
Świątek paid for her new ranking in the draw. She could play Jelena Ostapenko, the quirky, inconsistent 21st seed who has beaten Świątek all six times they've played, in the fourth round. Aryna Sabalenka, the world No 1, is her slated semi-final opponent. Gauff is in the opposite half, away from Świątek, away from Sabalenka. She looks likelier than the defending champion to make the Roland Garros final, a radical shift from previous editions of the tournament.
When playing on the Parisian clay again, Świątek's woes might dissolve into the background as she shreds the field once more. But Gauff is now, for the first time, a genuine threat to beat her there, more so than Federer ever was against Nadal. She may not win Roland Garros this year – Sabalenka, who beat Gauff in the Madrid final, could be just as difficult an opponent as Świątek – but merely arriving at a place where winning seems plausible is a small victory. Świątek could lose to somebody else, but I suspect Gauff will want to do the job herself. If she does, the various challenges she faces for the rest of her career should pale in comparison.