Iga Swiatek is not the first player to struggle under the burden of expectation after winning a grand slam title as a teenager, and she won’t be the last. Every great champion has their own path, and not everyone can be like Monica Seles or Martina Hingis, both of whom won their first major at the age of 16 and added to their tally within months. Maria Sharapova stormed to the Wimbledon title as a 17-year-old and had to wait two years for her next slam; for Aranxta Sanchez Vicario, a French Open champion at the same age, there was a five-year gap between her first and second victories. It takes time for serial success to take root.
Patience, however, has not always been Swiatek’s chief virtue. The Pole was 19 when she won Roland Garros last year, and her life has been on fast-forward ever since. She has not always looked comfortable with the demands that accompany instant fame – with the expectation, perhaps from herself as much as other people, that she should win virtually every match she plays – and at the Olympics, where she was upset by Spain’s Paula Badosa in round two, the pressure finally told as she wept inconsolably in her chair long after the match was done.
There were more tears at the US Open on Thursday, where Swiatek once again looked a woman in a hurry as she faltered in the face of a stubborn challenge from Fiona Ferro. Swiatek had prevailed in their only previous meeting, a commanding straight-sets win at the Australian Open in January, but this time the 74th-ranked Ferro was determined to come away with something to show for her big forehands and dogged, athletic defending. She was aided and abetted in that ambition by some infuriatingly unpredictable play from Swiatek, whose feared forehand, the cornerstone of her game, repeatedly went awry in the first two sets.
Pushing hard from the outset, Swiatek coughed up two consecutive forehand errors to drop her opening service game. She bounced back immediately with a love break, but Ferro had her foot in the door and was in no mood to be turned away. In the seventh game, Swiatek held a 0-30 lead against the Frenchwoman’s serve only to be pegged back after missing an inviting bounce smash, and in the next game she was broken as unforced errors again proved costly. The Pole was constructing the points well enough, but when the moment came to pull the trigger she was going for too much. Lack of conviction? Too much conviction? Either way, it was all the invitation Ferro needed to serve out the set, and as Swiatek’s forehand became ever more wayward she looked increasingly distraught.
A six-minute departure from the court did nothing to right the ship, and when she conceded the opening game of the second set with a horrendous mishit, immediately falling a break behind, her emotions finally got the better of her. As Swiatek knelt by her chair and wept into her towel, an upset looked imminent.
But the other thing about serial champions is their ability to find a way; to unlock the winning formula; to plot a course to the end goal. It is a quality that Swiatek, who is nothing if not a quick study, is slowly incorporating into her competitive arsenal, and it served her well here as she composed herself and began to play with greater margin. By the time she carved out two set points in the twelfth game, she was if anything guilty of playing too conservatively, some passive shot-making allowing Ferro to bring her weighty forehand to bear. But a finely judged lob volley laid the foundations for an impressive tiebreak, and once Swiatek had levelled she looked a player transformed, racing to the finish line to complete a 3-6, 7-6 (7-3), 6-0 victory.
“I just feel like, I feel the pressure,” said Swiatek, who will face a step up in class against Estonia’s Anett Kontaveit, the 28th seed, in the next round. “Before, I had like fuel in my mind to overcome it and to work on it, but I feel like it’s been happening a lot, so I’m having less and less of that fuel.
“Usually in grand slams it was easier for me because I was just, physically and tennis-wise, super prepared, and that was helping me. Here I am also prepared, but I feel like the pressure is bigger because of the ranking and everything that I have been going through. It’s hard to describe it, but I think it’s kind of usual of what players have after winning few tournaments for the first time.”
She’ll figure it out; champions always do.
If Swiatek needed any further evidence that things don’t always go smoothly at the top level, it came in the form of Ashleigh Barty’s 6-1, 7-5 victory over Clara Tauson of Denmark. For the second match in a row, the top seed won the opening set at a canter only to falter when serving for the match.
“There is that conscious change, I think, when things aren’t going right,” said Barty, who practised with Swiatek earlier in the day. “If you can’t change it, you’re digging yourself into a pretty big hole. A couple of times I was disappointed with service games today. When I was serving for the match and early on in the second set, I just played two pretty poor games. Being able to respond straightaway was a big part of that match, just refocusing and remembering what I needed to do to win the match as opposed to getting flat and passive, where I was letting her control a little bit too much.”
Britain’s Emma Raducanu pulled off another impressive victory, beating world No 49 Zhang Shuai 6-2, 6-4 to set up a third-round meeting with Spain’s Sara Sorribes Tormo, while Angelique Kerber set up a battle of former champions against Sloane Stephens with a 6-3, 6-2 win over Anhelina Kalinina.