Swiatek, Sabalenka and the Big Three: The best tennis rivalries elevate the players and the sport

New York Times

2 days ago

ROLAND GARROS, PARIS — If Thursday's French Open semifinal between Iga Świątek and Aryna Sabalenka feels like a rare women's tennis heavyweight battle at a Grand Slam, that's because it is.
Świątek and Sabalenka have been the two most dominant WTA players of this decade, winning eight slams between them. But this is only their second meeting at a major, the first coming three years ago at the U.S. Open, before Sabalenka had won her first Grand Slam title. Since then, they have won 23 titles between them, including the U.S. Open that Świątek won in 2022, after beating Sabalenka in the semifinals.
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It's not just Świątek and Sabalenka who have met relatively rarely at the slams. Add Coco Gauff and Elena Rybakina, the other two most successful players over the past few years, and there have been just 10 Grand Slam matches between the four since the start of 2022. Compare that with the three and a half seasons when the men's Big Four — Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray — were at their peak, between Wimbledon 2009 and the end of 2012, in which time they met 24 times, plus two at the Olympic Games.
This matters not because Świątek, Sabalenka, Gauff and Rybakina should be asked to match the ridiculous standards of that famed quartet. It matters because the greatest tennis rivalries, played out at the Grand Slams, define and elevate the sport around the world.
'It's massive,' 19-time Grand Slam singles champion Martina Navratilova said of the impact of rivalries in a recent phone interview.
'It just takes the sport to a different level when people get emotionally involved and identify with the player or the rivalry. You just get more into it. It makes it more personal.'
Navratilova, together with Chris Evert, formed the greatest rivalry in the history of women's tennis. It encompassed a record 80 matches and 14 major finals, defining tennis through large swaths of the 1970s and 1980s.
'Rivalries are everything,' said seven-time Grand Slam champion Mats Wilander in an interview at Roland Garros this week. 'You don't have to meet 60 times like Novak (Djokovic) and Rafa (Nadal), but rivalry is what our sport is about.'
The prospect of Swiatek vs. Sabalenka developing into the epochal rivalry that it has been threatening to become over the past few years is tantalizing, with the makings of a long-running battle for supremacy. Świątek, the cerebral and at times whimsical juggernaut capable of 30-plus win streaks and over 120 weeks at world No. 1, against Sabalenka, the light-hearted but ferociously powerful hard-court champion who has for now assumed top spot in the world rankings.
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Świątek has five Grand Slams, including four French Opens, while Sabalenka has three major titles to her name. Of active players, only Naomi Osaka, with four, has won this kind of number — and she's struggled to get anywhere near that level since returning to the sport last year after giving birth to her first child.
The WTA launched a full rebrand earlier this year, in a bid to add to the profile of its players. But for all the money, sponsorships and eyeballs marketing can bring, the biggest boon it could get would be the blossoming of a proper rivalry at the top of the sport.
While the Big Four and then Big Three era provided an accessible, lucrative gateway into men's tennis for more than 15 years, women's tennis has been missing a proper rivalry for decades.
'I first played pro tennis in 1991, when I was 15, and it was all about the rivalries,' former world No. 1 and three-time major winner Lindsay Davenport said during an interview at Roland Garros. 'We'd just lost Chrissy (Evert) about two years earlier and so there was this rivalry developing between Monica (Seles) and Steffi (Graf). And that was amazing until it wasn't.'
Graf won six matches in a four-year, 10-match rivalry that ebbed and flowed until 1993, when an obsessed fan of Graf stabbed Seles in the back at an event in Hamburg, Germany. Seles missed two years of tennis, and when she returned, Graf won four of the five matches they played.
'Women's tennis had been used to that, with Chris and Martina for all those years and then it became Monica and Steffi,' said Davenport, who's covering his year's French Open for TNT Sports.
'Then there was nobody who could really challenge Steffi when Monica was out. They tried to with Arantxa (Sanchez Vicario) and then the rest of the decade never really took off — it felt like there were too many different players winning.
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'Then all of a sudden the Williams sisters came, but that was a tricky rivalry because no one had ever really seen sisters have to battle it out. And then there were (Justine) Henin and (Kim) Clijsters for a little bit, but it doesn't feel like we've had that real huge rivalry like the men have had with the Big Three. So establishing that again would be important for the sport.'
Because of how dominant Serena Williams was, she had very few proper rivals.
'Women's tennis hasn't had a Grand Slam rivalry really since Steffi Graf and Monica Seles 30 years ago and hasn't had a proper on-court rivalry since Serena Williams vs. Justin Henin. That's a long time between drinks,' said one former WTA executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships.
'The lack of rivalries is affecting the visibility of the sport,' they added. The same executive added during the French Open: 'It's great that this match is happening but it needs to be a final … Women's tennis needs multiple Slam winners ranked No. 1 and No. 2, playing each other for the biggest prizes, with the outcome totally in doubt and fans speculating who will win.'
Tim Crow, the former head of international sports marketing agency Synergy, called rivalries 'critical' to marketability in a phone interview in January, and cited the examples of Federer and Nadal, Evert and Navratilova, and rivalries in football like Barcelona and Real Madrid.
'In individual sports, classic rivalries are like gold dust,' said sports marketing consultant Nigel Currie.
'Great rivalries tend to attract a wider audience as it's an entry point for those who are perhaps interested but not passionate about a particular sport. It gives them knowledge about a sport that otherwise they wouldn't have.'
Rivalries are so compelling because in pushing players to their sporting limits, they also reveal elements of players' personalities. Kim Clijsters, a former world No. 1 and four-time Grand Slam champion, had a couple of significant rivalries during her playing career. One was with her compatriot Henin, in which the narrative centered on how different and distant the two were. Clijsters, the outgoing one from the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium; Henin, the more clinical Francophone. Clijsters also had many seismic matches with Serena Williams, including one at the 2009 U.S. Open in which Williams was defaulted for verbally abusing a line judge.
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'Rivalries are super important — for the fans, for the tournaments. There was a rivalry between Justine and me, but there was also a rivalry between the Belgians and the Williams sisters,' Clijsters said during an interview this week.
'I love seeing that. I love the emotions that come out. Seeing a player who's having that experience of being really nervous — it wasn't fun when I was playing Justine, but when I see players going through it now, that's what it's all about. That's the beauty of tennis.'
Rivalries also have the effect of lifting players' level, raising the overall standard of the sport. One of the reasons the Big Three were so dominant for so long was that they created an ouroboros of tennis supremacy. The more they played one another, the more they separated themselves from the pack.
'Anybody that you play that has different tennis characteristics that are better than yours is great,' Clijsters said.
'I played Serena the first time in 1999. I realized: 'Holy moly, she hits the ball hard.' Against Venus, OK, I can't teach my wingspan to be better, but the way that she was able to move side to side, I'd never experienced that.
'Playing against Justine, especially here, the chip that she had with the return. Those things didn't come naturally to me. I wanted to work on that, and comparing to another athlete can sometimes be bad, but it can also be really good, because it can push you to show your weaknesses and where you want to improve.
'Everybody teaches you different things, especially the losses.'
Clijsters believes Świątek's and Sabalenka's level will go up significantly from playing one another. Former world No. 5 Daniela Hantuchová agrees, and said in an interview that players often spend time in pre-season specifically working on elements of their game to counter a rival. She said that she would often think about how she could improve to live with Serena Williams.
Sabalenka and Świątek both spoke Tuesday about how they know they need to be at their best to beat each other.
'Every time I face her, I get better, and she forces me to get better,' Sabalenka said in a news conference at the Australian Open in January, where they could have met in the final. 'She also motivates me to work really hard and to get better.'
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Clijsters believes Świątek has already made small adjustments for Sabalenka, like playing with a less extreme forehand grip to give herself a bit more time. And perhaps against the world No. 1 Thursday, Świątek will step back a bit to return serve — as she was forced to do against another elite opponent in Rybakina a few days ago, illustrating the point about how playing the best forces you to evolve and improve.
'They elevate you because you have to play better,' said Navratilova. 'You have to be close to your best to beat the other one. Because they're not going to give it to you. In tennis you can only play great if the other player forces you to play great, because you can only hit great shots if they force you to hit great shots.'
So what makes a great tennis rivalry? Navratilova believes in a relatively even head to head, with fairly frequent matches. A contrast in personalities and game styles helps too: Evert vs. Navratilova, Borg vs. McEnroe, Federer vs. Nadal and Andre Agassi vs. Pete Sampras were all characterized in this way.
A bit of needle is generally an easy sell. Agassi and Sampras didn't get on, nor in the early days did Federer have much time for Djokovic, while McEnroe and Jimmy Connors largely loathed one another. There was no love lost in the non-rivalry between Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, whom Williams beat in 20 of their 22 meetings.
But Federer and Nadal's relationship was defined by mutual respect, ditto Borg and McEnroe. Evert and Navratilova got on so well that in the early 1980s, Nancy Lieberman, the groundbreaking women's basketball star, told Navratilova that to be successful, she had to feel hostility towards her rival.
The advice worked, as Navratilova went on a run of 13 wins a row against Evert. Having gotten so close emotionally, Evert realised that the friendship was a problem when Navratilova started winning more often.
'I had to tell her, I can't play doubles with you. It's affecting my singles,' Evert said in an interview at Wimbledon last year.
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Then there's the Williams sisters, which never really worked as a rivalry because of how close they were and the awkwardness that seemed to throw up when they faced one another.
Świątek and Sabalenka sit somewhere in the middle. They have become closer after hitting together at the WTA Finals in Saudi Arabia last year, before performing a dance that Sabalenka shared on TikTok.
The pair hit together ahead of the French Open, and Sabalenka said Tuesday: 'I think everything started when I just came to her and asked to do the TikTok in Riyadh. Since that, we were, like, 'OK, maybe we can communicate, we can be good to each other, we can practice sometimes.'
Irrespective of how well they get on, many are hoping that this can be another great rivalry in the sport. Navratilova believes their nationalities could be a stumbling block, pointing to the fact that as a Belarusian, Sabalenka can't even have a flag next to her name. 'They're not from the quote-unquote, right countries,' Navratilova said. Sabalenka's nationality has been acknowledged as an obstacle in her achieving her full commercial potential, with her brand deals not yet commensurate with her status in the sport alongside Świątek.
Otherwise, 'It's got all the ingredients,' Navratilova said. 'I think frequency is what's lacking, particularly at the majors.'
Thursday's meeting is long overdue.
(Top photos: Li Jing / Xinhua, Antonio Borga / Eurasia Sport via Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic)